


as souls only understand souls

by homesickblues



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: AU, AU: time traveler's wife, Alternate Universe, M/M, background cobb/mal, background yusuf/ariadne, i think i briefly mention fischer once but uh..., time traveler's wife au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:06:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6449377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur’s found a lot of very interesting things in the five acres of land behind his parents’ house before. Frogs, worms, a snake eating a mouse, some ants carrying leaves, even a fox one time which scurried away back into the thick of the woods like the flicker of a flame. Arthur’s sure, however, that he’s never found anything quite as interesting as a fully grown, naked man</p><p>**</p><p>A <i>The Time Traveler's Wife</i> AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	as souls only understand souls

**Author's Note:**

> **READ THIS CAREFULLY:**  
>     
> This story jumps around a lot as it involves a character traveling through time. Often there are chapters that DO NOT fit chronologically - instead they are flashbacks (or flash forwards). 
> 
> To make it easier to read, I have **bolded** the titles of the chapters (which are just names and ages) that  fit within the main storyline and _italicized_ chapter titles that don't, and are instead  glimpses into another part of time for one or both characters. Sometimes one character will be bolded and another italicized... this means that the bolded character is within the chronological story, and the italicized character isn't. (i.e. when Eames, within the chronological story, travels back in time to see Arthur as a kid, etc). 
> 
> If _that_ gets confusing, follow the ages! Arthur and Eames's main storyline starts when they are 22 and 24, respectively.
> 
> ALSO: this is based _loosely_ on _The Time Traveler's Wife_. Meaning, the basic premise is the same, but the story is different. I do throw in some homages to the original throughout, but really do read that book, it's amazing! (the movie's good too... but make sure to bring a LOT of tissues).

 

Prologue:

 

_Eames, Age 7_

 

Cedric Eames thinks that maybe he’s imagining things, because he’s positive he just went back in time.

At least, he’s pretty sure. One moment he’s curled up in his closet with his stuffed zebra from when he was a baby, tears streaming down his face as he listens to his father scream violent obscenities at his mother and smack her around. She’d locked him in his bedroom when his father came home drunk, because last time this happened he’d tried to intervene to stick up for his mummy and ended up with a concussion and two black eyes. Three days in hospital, and his head hurt and the food was terrible.

As he’s sitting there, however, he gets the strangest sensation that makes him feel warm all over, and dizzy, as if he’s suddenly engulfed in warm flames but also falling through empty space. The sensation shoots through his body like venom, gnashing and twisting its way down his spine and through his limbs. He closes his eyes in fear, thinking that maybe he’s dying, or maybe he’s been struck by lightning.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s just outside of the closet but he’s naked and his parents are saying things that they said about five minutes beforehand. He’s _sure_ of it. It frightens him. He doesn’t understand. His dad repeats himself a lot when he’s like this, he knows, but never the _exact same words_ with the _exact same inflection_. He even hears a plate smash against a wall at the same cue as it had before.

He listens in horror at the commotion from downstairs and wonders how he could ever tell his mummy about what just happened, and if she’d believe him. He ducks into the closet again, seeing a flash of something vanish before he's met with emptiness again. He closes the door and curls back up in the corner. His head is spinning and his stomach is churning and he can taste bile and _metal_ in his mouth and the world is terrifyingly sharp and jagged and _wrong_. He snatches up his zebra and starts sobbing, terrified and _alone_ , when suddenly the door to the closet opens and there’s an older man he doesn’t recognize standing over him. The older man has kind eyes like his mummy but has features that are more than a little reminiscent of his dad so he flinches, scared. The man’s wrapped in the Star Wars blankets from his bed because he’s naked too and has a strange look on his face. Cedric should be scared, and he _should_ scream and run, but he just sits and stares up at the man, feeling the oddest gut-deep feeling of déjà-vu.

The man kneels and hurriedly dresses Cedric in his pajamas. His hands are shaking almost violently

“Cedric, _Ceddy-Bear_ , listen very closely to what I say to you, love.”

He speaks softly, yet urgently, stuffing Cedric’s legs into his pajama bottoms and doing up his buttons. He flinches very visibly every time Cedric’s dad gets particularly loud or angry in the background. Cedric’s mouth falls agape in silent question at how this random naked man in his room could _possibly_ know the nickname his mummy calls him. Not even his horrible father knows about that nickname. No other person in the world could ever know about that name, because his mummy only whispers it to him when they’re alone: sometimes after story time before bed as she tucked him in, sometimes when he’d get home from school and run up the steps to meet her embrace, sometimes when she’d snatch him up for no particular reason at all, tickling and kissing him and telling him how she loved him to the moon and back.

The man seems to register the question in his eyes and brushes back his bangs. He looks tired and has dark bags under his eyes, but his face is much softer, much kinder than his father’s. His nose and lips are similar, but they aren’t intimidating at all. “I’m you from the future,” the man continues once Cedric is fully-dressed. He looks up for a moment, above Cedric’s head, and scans his closet before taking his warmest coat off the hanger and tugging it onto his small frame. “You have the ability to travel through time. You just did it for the first time. It’s _very important_ you listen to me right now, duck, look at me. Every time it happens, you’ll end up somewhere from your past usually, or someone you love’s past, and you’ll be naked and alone. You need to find clothes and possibly food because you could be there for a few hours, or a few days. Then, you need to find a way to keep yourself safe until you go back. It’s scary at first, I know, but you’ll get used to it. I promise,”

Cedric scans the man’s face then in curious wonder, believing him wholly as most 7-year-olds would do if told the same thing. He notes the grey-blue-green eye color (his mummy told him once that his eyes looked like stormy seas) and the deep scar over his right eyebrow from his dad throwing a whiskey bottle at his head (he only just got the stitches out last week).

The man pauses to listen to the argument downstairs, which has seemed to grow quieter for some reason. Cedric has a wistful thought that maybe they’ve finished for the night. Maybe he fell asleep and he dreamed this whole thing up.

The man takes his face into his hands, looking him dead in the eye. “Things will be okay, darling,” he whispers urgently. “They will be. One day.”

He hears his mummy scream very suddenly, and then there’s a loud bang that sounds like the kind of fireworks his cousins like to set off on bonfire day. His mummy screams his name, screams for him to run, before there’s a second piercing firework bang and things downstairs go silent. The bangs are sharp and final and Cedric opens his mouth to scream but the older man covers his mouth. Tears fill the older man’s eyes but he quickly picks Cedric up and takes him over to the window.

“Go, now,” he practically snarls, “Go run to your neighbors and tell them to call the police and _hide_ , okay? Remember what I said. Remember it will be okay.”

There are footsteps coming up the stairs now, echoing off the walls, and Cedric just wants his mummy and he just wants things to be okay, but he listens to the man, to _himself_ , and hops out his window, crawling carefully down the tree into his yard. Bare feet against soft grass, he’s running and he hears more bangs. They seem to pierce through the cool night wind. He keeps running.

He never really stops running. From what, _towards what_ , he’ll never be sure.

 

**

 

_Arthur, Age 33_

Arthur sits perfectly still, his gaze turned out of the large window that faces west in his foyer. The sun’s already set but there’s still the pink-orange afterglow peeking through the trees, illuminating the forest in warm hues. The pines bathe in their last few moments of sunlight. Arthur watches despite feeling like gravity is no longer a passive thing which makes all things fall, but something that’s forcibly pushing him toward the ground.

His body aches with exhaustion, the sleepless nights piling high just like the dirty dishes in the sink, the unopened mail on the countertop that isn’t addressed to him. Sleep doesn’t come as easily as it used to. When he was younger, he would sleep just to pass the time until things were normal again. He aches to do that now, but his body refuses to let him, keeping him awake in various degrees of crushing dread, miserable loneliness.

He closes his eyes once the light has entirely vanished and the stars are visible, allowing himself to conjure up the memory of what it feels like to have someone else in the room with him; sitting beside him, shuffling around the kitchen, touching him…

The hardest part of missing someone is reconciling their absence in the spaces they normally fill.

But this is the price of being married to a ghost.

He picks himself up after a while, feeling muscles in various parts of his body ache for sitting for too long, a problem that’s only come about recently, worry and age catching up with him like weights. He pauses as he walks past the living room, his cello leaning up against the wall, untouched, as it’s been for a long time now. He can barely remember the feel of the vibration through his body as he drags the bow across the strings. He’s supposed to be practicing for performance season to start again, but the music doesn’t keep him from drowning anymore.  

He turns away. Then, like he does every night, he reaches inside himself and twists the proverbial ‘okayness’ dial that exists just above his diaphragm up a couple of notches, stands, and goes to make dinner for two.

It’s stupid, really. It isn’t _necessary_. If his husband returns, he can just find something to eat out of the fridge if he’s hungry (which he always is when he comes back from traveling). But it’s something Arthur does every night, and if setting out a second plate and wine glass makes him feel better, then goddammit, he figures, it’s worth it. (And if he ends up pouring that second wine glass and drinking it himself when Eames inevitably doesn’t appear – then all the better.)

He decides to go for simple. Pasta and a salad. Something he can toss together within mere minutes with his eyes closed. He turns the radio on and pours himself his (first) too-large glass of red wine and sets to work, dicing tomatoes and boiling water.

The radio begins humming the song that they played during their wedding and Arthur accidentally slices his finger at the knuckle, making him curse and rush to the sink so the blood doesn’t get everywhere. As he finds a towel, muttering to himself about how much of an idiot he is for reacting like that, there’s a loud crash from somewhere in the house. Arthur jumps and turns, his heart racing and his breath stuttering and the question of ‘ _could it be…?’_ rattling around his head.

He takes a hesitant step forward.

“ _Arthur!”_

 _No,_ Arthur’s mind thinks outright, because yes, that is his husband’s voice, but it has none of the usual notes of love or cheerfulness or humor. All he hears now is… fear. And pain. He flat-out rejects this reality, because the universe could not be _that_ cruel, truly. It can’t be.

This rejection is short-lived, however, because his name is bellowed again only this time it sounds like it’s being choked out through a mouthful of blood.

“EAMES!” Arthur roars, launching himself forward in a blind panic. “Eames, where _are you_?! _WHERE ARE YOU_?!”

The world blurs around him in varying shades of light as he rushes through the empty house, going dark around the edges with every slam of his heart against his ribcage.

 _Nonononono. No. Not now. Please, god, not_ now _. I’m not ready._

He hears a distinct cry of pain and it _tears_ through him. He runs as fast as he can, but when he reaches the source of the sound, their bedroom, all he finds is a mangled pool of thick blood, still foaming and bubbling slightly as if it had just exited a wound. There are swipes in it that look like the recent trace of fingers, but soon the hardwood beneath disappears as they dissolve back into red.

 

**

 

_Arthur, Age 8_

_(Eames, older)_

 

Arthur’s found a lot of _very_ interesting things in the five acres of land behind his parents’ house before. Frogs, worms, a snake eating a mouse, some ants carrying leaves, even a fox one time which scurried away back into the thick of the woods like the flicker of a flame. Arthur’s sure, however, that he’s never found anything quite as interesting as a fully grown, naked man.

It’s late afternoon and starting to move into dusk, the warm sun starting to disappear behind the usual evening fog. His daddy is away on some important grown-up business trip to somewhere with tall buildings and fast trains. His mommy developed a headache from staring at a blank notebook all day and waiting for inspiration to fall out of the ceiling, so she decided to take a nap before getting up to fix dinner. She’d instructed Arthur to go play outside and bring her some pretty leaves. He scans the foliage for them, enjoying the way his shoes sink a little bit into the muddy earth after the rain from earlier, when he happens upon the unusual sight.

When Arthur finds the man, he ducks behind a quite dense patch of bushes and pokes his head out. He’s an older man, Arthur thinks, around his Daddy’s age, maybe a little older.

“’Ello there!” The man says in his best _I’m not scary, please don’t be scared_ tone of voice.

Arthur frowns and clutches his satchel full of treasures (cool-looking rocks, drawings he made at school, broken crayons, and some butterscotch candies) close to his chest. He wonders why this random naked stranger has a British accent, like the ones he sometimes hears on the radio or in the films his daddy watches late at night about men in fancy suits shooting things.

“Who are you? Where are your clothes? It’s getting chilly.” Arthur scrunches up his nose and furrows his brow, “Are you one of those people my Daddy told me to stay away from? Pad-o-tiles?”

The man blinks in humor before shaking his head briskly, a bright, crooked grin appearing, somewhat obscured by the leafy scrub oak branches.

“No, no, _promise_ , I’m not. Could you do me a quick favor? Could you run and fetch some clothes form inside, maybe some of your Daddy’s clothes?” The man squints his eyes and looks skyward as if considering some important detail. “Some of his _bigger_ clothes, maybe.”

Arthur’s frown deepens.

“I should get my Mommy,” he deadpans, kicking at a wad of dirt at his feet and staring down at his knobby knees, still scraped up from tripping over that ant hill two days before when he was chasing a fat brown rabbit through the trees.

“No need. I’m not sure your mum would be very happy to see me… please, duck, go and fetch some clothes,” he pauses, adding, “I promise I won’t hurt you.”

Arthur, having the instinct to run but the curiosity of an unusually precautious and adventurous eight-year-old, drops his satchel and sprints across the full acre-and-a-half of land and into his house.

Moments later he returns with the clothes: his daddy’s old Harvard t-shirt from when he “rowed crew” and was “buff” as well as a pair of baggy sweatpants. He walks up cautiously and hands them to the man before taking three big steps back, wobbling a bit on the last one.

“Brilliant, love. Just brilliant. Now turn away while I dress, please.” The stranger says in a kind, warm tone which makes Arthur obey. He pivots, his shoe easily turning in the mud-soaked earth, and crosses his arms.

Tapping his foot impatiently, he frowns and looks up at the sky.

“Why are you in our backyard? Are you lost? Why are you naked? Why are you _British_?”

Arthur’s at the stage of childhood where every passing second requires a question. Somewhere behind him, the stranger chuckles fondly, as if having some sort of inside-joke with himself.

“You can turn around now.” And Arthur does, just as the stranger steps out of the brush.

He’s tall, but not as tall as Arthur’s daddy. He’s much broader though, with more bulky muscle than the lean he was used to seeing on his father, making the Harvard shirt quite tight around his chest and arms. He has short messy hair and full lips and a slight beard and a lot of tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves. Arthur thinks he looks like a pirate.

“There will be plenty of time to answer your questions, love. But first, let me introduce myself. My name’s Eames. Cedric Eames, but please do just call me Eames. My first name’s silly and I don’t like it.”

Arthur purses his lips and twists his left foot around in the dirt.

“What kind of a name is ‘Eames’?”

The stranger, Eames, lets out a hardy chuckle.

“A weird one, you’re right. But aren’t you going to introduce yourself as well?”

Arthur considers this very seriously. He remembers his daddy sitting him down one night and teaching him about “stranger danger”, the importance of never talking to adults he didn’t know, and _definitely_ never giving his name to strange adults he didn’t know. But Arthur’s too impossibly intrigued by the situation to let any stupid dad-rules get in the way of this adventure.

“My name’s Arthur,” Arthur muses as he scrubs the back of his sleeve under his nose unceremoniously, sniffling as he peeks back up at the man suspiciously. “Are you a pirate?”

Eames grins wickedly then, with the tenderest eyes Arthur’s ever seen.

“Why yes, my dear Arthur, I am. Would you like to be my first mate?”

 

**

 

**Arthur, Age 22**

**(Eames, Age 24)**

 

Arthur’s first year at Harvard is a breeze. His second is even easier. His third, not so much. He figures he knew it would all come crashing down at some point, his life. He knew from the moment Eames had last said goodbye to him that it would only be a matter of time until things fell apart in one way or another. What he didn’t expect was for it to be all at once. He’d failed a test in his most important class – composition – on the same day his mother called with the news that his father had testicular cancer.

And so he holes himself up in the library (only because every single practice room was taken), away from his annoyingly talkative roommate and the temptation to walk down to the street to the bars and get sloshed and away from the never-ending dull pain of abandonment and impatience. He willingly and forcefully forgets everything but the material he shoves into his brain from textbook after textbook he reads and the familiar thud of coffee disagreeing with his digestion and causing his heart to race too fast. His fingers twitch as he reads, missing the feeling of metal strings, the glide of the bow vibrating through his cello and into his body. It’s the only thing that relaxes him anymore – grounds him.

It’s October, dangerously close to Halloween, making the library nearly empty save for the few hermit shut-ins like himself. Especially this close to midnight, though, it’s quite empty. It’s Arthur’s favorite time, where he can be left in peace and his mind can remain quite comfortably blank and quiet. He doesn’t think about the things he normally thinks about when he lets his mind wander. Doesn’t think about Eames’s earnest eyes, his fingers grazing against Arthur’s jaw while he whispered, “ _The next time you see me won’t be for a few years. But I won’t know you. You have to make sure I know you, Arthur. Don’t go easy on me._ ”

Arthur had spent many nights staring at the ceiling of his studio apartment, worrying his lip raw with his teeth, panicked that when Eames finally stumbled back into his life he wouldn’t recognize him somehow and he’d miss him. Or maybe he’d realize Eames was a hallucination all along and wasn’t going to suddenly appear and make everything okay again. (Okay, he knew that couldn’t be true since there are ways to _tell_ when you’ve had sex with someone, especially when you lose your virginity to someone. He definitely couldn’t have simply conjured up the thick fingerprints bruised onto his hips, the way he ached the next day… These things are physical. Corporeal. Definitely _not_ a figment of his imagination… or insanity). He tries to take the anxiety out in his music sometimes, but the last time he did he ended up with a snapped string almost taking his eye out.

He flips a page and feels his brain slowly turning to day-old oatmeal and wishes he would just keel over and die rather than take another midterm.

That’s when his phone buzzes obnoxiously loud on the table next to his laptop, and he has to scoop it up and silence it quickly, ducking his head to avoid the glares of the few people sitting around him.

“Ari,” he answers in a half-snarl-half-whisper, “it’s late. I’m at the library,”

“Oh _boo_. You never used to be so boring, Arthur. I want to go out. Let’s go out.”

Arthur sighs, but begins packing up his things despite himself.

“I haven’t had a very good day,” he says in a measured voice, stuffing his laptop into his backpack and closing his textbooks.

He can hear Ariadne sigh, and he involuntarily flinches. He’s a serial excuse-maker and it’s one of his least attractive traits, he knows. 

“Then even more reason to go out. It’ll be fun! Everyone’ll be dressed up since it’s Saturday and Halloween’s on Monday night. All the ghosts and goblins are out _tonight_ and I need to run amongst them, Arthur. They’re my _people_. C’ _mon_ Arthur-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”

Arthur rolls his eyes, momentarily regretting his choice of bizarre and slightly macabre best friend before remembering how completely fucking awesome she is. He tries vaguely to think of a witty Star Wars-themed comeback but comes up short, his brain fried.

“Okay, I’ll meet you at your place and we’ll head out, okay?” He hurriedly leaves the library as the other boring studiers are starting to get visibly upset at the sound of his voice.

“Good call, my young padawan,”

“Shut up.”

“I love you!”

And that’s how, an hour later, Arthur finds himself at a crowded bar with some horrid remix of “Monster Mash” playing obscenely over the loud speakers with too much bass, drinking a whiskey sour and feeling awkward in no costume as a variety of vampires, witches and various characters from “Mean Girls” buzz around him. They’re all dancing and taking shots and living out their college dreams for what Halloween should be like and Arthur feels like it’s a different world from his: one that he doesn’t quite understand, not one that he thinks is repulsive or anything. He’s not one for judgement.

Ariadne’s got her arm hooked loosely in his as she leans against the bar. She decided to come dressed up as Wednesday Addams, but she can’t seem to wipe the blissed out grin off her face to get fully into character. (She’d tried to make him come as Pugsley, but when he almost murdered her in cold blood for even suggesting it she’d said that he could go dressed as himself and she’d tell people he was Lurch. He wasn’t sure what was more offensive).

He leans down to ask her if she wants to dance or get another drink or _something_ when she lets out a squeak he notices she’s looking across the room to where Yusuf, their other friend whom Ariadne not-so-secretly wants to “climb like a tree” (her quote, not his), is hanging out by himself dressed up as Batman, nursing a beer and looking bored. Yusuf’s quite a bit older than them, studying to become a doctor, a genius, and befriended them one summer when he was working at the same record store Arthur was.

Arthur follows her line of sight and chuckles, lifting his eyebrows. He looks down at his tiny friend and nudges her with his shoulder.

“Go, or you’ll regret it.”

“Shut up. I came here with you.”

Arthur responds with a raised brow and she huffs.

“I’m _over_ him. He has a nice face, that’s all…”

“A face you’d like to sit on,” Arthur amends and is met with a well-deserved slap on the arm and a scowl. “Just go, Ari. Now or never, right?”

Ariadne purses her lips in feigned difficult contemplation before giving in. She gives him a toothy grin before downing the rest of her beer and moving to leave. At the last moment she pauses and looks back at him, frowning.

“Will you be okay alone?”

“I think I can handle myself, Mom.”

“You should go home with someone tonight, Arthur. Live a little.”

“I take it back, my mom would never say that to me.”

She beams and sings “Make good choices!” in her momiest of voices before practically skipping off to Yusufland, abandoning Arthur to his own devices.

 _Well_ , he thinks, _at least I can get shitfaced here and no one will look at me funny._

He orders another drink and rubs at his temples ruefully, trying to block the thoughts of all the horrible parts of his day from his mind. The music switches to “Thriller”, and Arthur’s glad that someone at least has a shred of musical dignity left.

He sees someone move to lean up against the bar out of the corner of his eye but doesn’t turn.

But _then_ :

“Right, can I please get one tequila sunrise, one dirty vodka martini with olives and one G-and-T please? Cheers.”

His body reacts to the voice before his mind does, his fingers clenching and his heart speeding up to the point of thudding violently against his ribcage, pounding up into his esophagus. He realizes, then, that it doesn’t matter how long ago it was, he would know that voice in ten years, fifteen, _fifty_. It’s a little younger sounding, less rough around the edges, but it’s there, and it’s _real_. He turns his head slowly, eyes wide and heart threatening to burst out of his chest.  

Eames is the same height as Arthur remembers, but modestly less broad and muscled. He has a few tattoos peeking out from above his collar along his clavicle, but not nearly as many as he will one day. His hair is slightly shaggier than he’ll keep it: messy locks of sandy brown that brush the top of his ears. He’s maybe still a couple years older than Arthur, and Arthur can’t help but laugh at the irony of how no matter what, Eames will _never_ be younger or the same age as him.

And he’s dressed up as Han Solo.

 _Of fucking course_ , he thinks.

He sounds agitated. A kind of irritation that Arthur’s fairly sure only people who know him well would be able to detect, as he sounds perfectly polite and charming to the bartender. But there’s an underlying tension in his voice, but Arthur can’t worry on it because he _found him_.

He laughs. Quietly at first, but turning quickly into hysterics.

Eames whirls around, eyes alight with indignant anger, and stares Arthur down with flared nostrils.

“Something funny, mate?” Arthur notices that he puts on a bit more of a rough South Londoner accent than his normal Queen’s, probably in a piss poor attempt at seeming scary.

“It’s you,” Arthur all but whispers as he calms down, the smile on his lips turning into one of wonder, entirely unfazed by Eames’s glower and harsh glare.

“Pardon?” Eames stares at him, his expression melting into one of apprehension. Even though the music’s loud, Arthur’s sure he heard him.

Arthur beams like the dumb kid he once was, some light switch deep behind his ribcage flickering on for the first time in years and causing him to _glow_ from the inside out.

He leans in and speaks over the music this time. “It’s really… you told me this would happen, and you also told me to act normal, and I’m doing a shit job of that already… but I… _Eames_.” He clears his throat, “Eames… it’s _you_ and…”

Eames stares at him blankly for a long moment, the anger dissolving from his face and replacing with something else: an emotion Arthur’s sure he recognizes but isn’t used to. The bartender arrives back with Eames’s drinks, and Eames blinks and is knocked straight out of his trance. He gives the bartender a tight smile and tosses a few bills down on the bar, glancing over at Arthur nervously.

Arthur’s smile falls a bit at Eames’s apprehension, so he continues, “I know all about everything,” he whispers. “The traveling… who you _are_ …”

Before he knows what’s happening Eames has Arthur by the wrist and is pulling him quickly through the crowd and out of the bar, drinks forgotten. The air is crisp and cool outside, and the breeze smells like the savory tang of cigarette smoke as well as freshly baked bread and apple cider.

“Right.” Eames rounds on him and squints suspiciously, but Arthur can see the way it falters slightly. “I really have no idea who you are, mate. I’ve never seen you before…”

“I’ve known you since I was eight years old,” Arthur presses on, unwilling to let himself hesitate because this is Eames, _his Eames_ , and he’ll understand. He has to. “That’s when you started visiting me. When I was eight. And you visited me right up until my eighteenth birthday, when you told me that in a few years, I would meet you. The _you_ that exists in the same time as me. And… and…”

Eames stares at him for a moment like he’s just sprouted a second head, but then his lips press into a line and softens slightly, even if his posture still resembles that of a frightened cat.

“You… I…” he swallows, “You know about my… condition. What I can do…” It isn’t so much a question as a resigned and stunned statement of fact.

“Yes,” Arthur breathes, his eyes wide and honest and vulnerable, “at first I thought you were something magical, like Santa or the Easter Bunny, but you were always so real. I’ve never told another soul. I promised you that. But I also promised you that when I saw you now, I would make you understand… make you see…” Arthur laughs briskly, running a hand over his face. “I believe your exact words were that I shouldn’t go easy on you…”

When he looks back up, Arthur can see it registering in Eames’s expression. The fact that in order for Arthur to know, he must have truly visited him. And in order for him to visit him, Arthur’s important. Arthur has to be important, because like older, greyer Eames had told him one sunny but biting autumn, it only takes him to the places and people that are the most important to him.

Eames motions for him to follow, and Arthur does. They return to the bar and Eames leads him back to a more secluded area where there’s a red leather booth and softer lighting. In the booth are two people: a handsome man with a square face and soft blue eyes, wearing what looks like a Darth Vader costume without the mask and a woman with dark hair and sharp blue eyes who looks like she walked straight out of her starring role as the femme fatale in a 1940’s noir even if she’s dressed up as Princess Leia. 

“Cedric, where are our drinks?” The woman asks with a pout on her face, her accent crisp and French and _god_ why is Arthur even surprised.

“And who is this?” The man asks, squinting a bit up at him.

“I’ve actually got to go,” Eames leans down and pecks the woman’s cheek chastely before patting the man on the shoulder, “something’s come up. I promise I’ll call you…”

“What the fuck, Eames?” the man says through clenched teeth. “Robert’s not even here yet. We’re supposed to-”

“Non, Dom, let him go. We’ll see you tomorrow, mon chér,” the woman says calmly.

The man crosses his arms and looks obscenely put-out, but the woman shakes it off and smiles, glancing Arthur up and down like he’s the bottle of expensive wine a waiter brings to the table to sample. She winks and once again Arthur feels Eames’s hand on his wrist, leading him away.

“Let’s go somewhere quiet,” Eames says once they’re outside. “Are you hungry?”

Arthur doesn’t feel hungry, doesn’t feel anything from the ribs down really, but he nods agreeably anyway. “Yeah…”

“There’s a Japanese place open ‘til two that’s just around the corner. No one’ll be there yet since the bars are still open. We’ll have time to talk…”

Arthur nods and can’t help but grin so hard his cheeks hurt. Eames looks back up at him like he’s really truly _seeing_ him for the first time. His expression is still slightly timid, slightly wary, but Arthur can see Eames _see_ _him_. Arthur thinks briefly of Ariadne, and how he’ll probably be receiving a very strongly-worded drunk text from her in the near future, but he pushes it all to the back of his mind and focuses on the way Eames is looking at him.

“What’s your name?” Eames askes with his brow still furrowed but his eyes soft.

Arthur laughs, knowing that this is the second and last time this introduction will ever be made.

“Arthur”.

 

**

 

_Arthur, Age 13_

_(Eames, older)_

 

Arthur feels his shoulders relax under the warm touch of Eames’s calloused hands, but it doesn’t stop his crying at all: raw, painful sobs that rip through his body like a jagged piece of glass. The more he tries to stop, the more he cries. Eames doesn’t try to stop him, only keeps him aware of his presence, strong and _real_ , and offers support. Everything feels wrong. He feels _wrong_. He’s too long suddenly; his body is protesting against him and growing out in all directions.

“It’s so stupid,” Arthur gasps. “I hate this,”

“This is one of the hardest times of your life. Trust me, I know,” Eames chuckles knowingly, and Arthur wants to be mad that he’s finding humor in this, humor in the constant bouts of agonizing pain as his bones stretch and his muscles ache and his body does weird things that make his emotions go haywire.

But he can’t be mad. He can never be mad at Eames.

“I just want it to be over with. I just want to be fully grown like I am where you come from,”

“You’ll get there one day, love. You will. But for now, you have to enjoy being thirteen. Enjoy being young, because you’ll only be young once, and then it’s over. There isn’t any going back,”

“You go back,” Arthur snaps. Eames only presses his thumb a bit harder into Arthur’s shoulder and moves it in a circle.

“I’m still an old man, if you haven’t noticed,” Eames chuckles brightly, using his other hand to wipe a few stray waves off of Arthur’s forehead, “I can never go back to my youth and experience what it’s like to be young again. Nobody can. And one day you’ll talk about how much you miss being a kid with scraped knees and mud caked into your hair and trousers. The pain is temporary, as are the hormones. They’ll subside and you’ll be able to see how wonderful life is again. I promise.”

Arthur tilts his chin and looks up at him, tear-trails wetting his cheeks. Eames’s eyes soften and he reaches up, gently cupping Arthur’s face and stroking his thumbs across his cheekbones, catching the tears.

“Oh Arthur… oh _darling_ ,” he coos softly, his expression so incredibly tender Arthur’s breath catches in a hiccup as he meets his gaze. “ _Everything is going to be okay.”_

Arthur catches his breath and wipes furiously at his tears, easing himself back into a sense of calmness. Eames drops his hands to his shoulders and squeezes gently. Arthur’s legs aren’t aching as bad as they were and he no longer finds the urge to scream. He looks up to tell Eames that he doesn’t care if he’s supposed to be enjoying his youth, that he just wants to skip to the part where they can be grown-up together, but all he finds is air.

Warm air, air that still smells like Eames’s spicy aftershave, but air nonetheless. He touches his shoulders, the weight of Eames’s strong hands suddenly absent, making him feel a cold shiver run up his spine. He sighs and gathers up the crumpled clothes on the ground and puts them back into the box he hides in the bushes.

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 24**

**(Arthur, Age 22)**

 

“This is weird,” Eames contemplates not admitting this, but does anyway between large bites of Katsu curry and gulps of dry beer. Arthur pauses, his own chopsticks hanging in the air, and his expression reads as if his heart just fell to the floor and shattered. Eames feels a pang of guilt. He’s truly remarkable, Eames muses to himself. Lean, pale, stiff… not at all his type, really. Or what he assumed was his type. He isn’t so sure anymore, especially after the image of Arthur’s dimples flashes through his mind: his bright eyes, his laughter lines…

“It isn’t how I imagined it,” Arthur says quietly after a moment before going back to plucking at his own food. “But then, maybe I was stupid to imagine it as not being weird… You have no idea who I am.”

Eames lifts a corner of his lips sympathetically, “I’m sorry. I really, truly am. It’s just… a lot to process. I do believe you, though. Obviously… it’s not like I have any other choice _but_ to believe you.”

His mind drifts back to time after time when his older self – strapping, beefier and beardy – had come back and dropped all kinds of chuffed, secretive hints about his future.

“ _Is there someone…?”_ he’d asked himself once in a particularly vulnerable moment, wondering if he could ever… _should_ ever put someone else through all this.

“ _Of course there is, you daft git. And your whole universe centers around them and you won’t deserve them one bit_ ,” older him had responded with a distant, somewhat pained look in his eyes.

The wanker…

He sighs and looks back up at Arthur, really _looks_ , and finds a young man with dimples and kind eyes and–

“I guess… I guess I don’t really know what the future holds for us, so I can’t… I mean I assumed…” Arthur pauses and sighs, obviously taking a moment to collect his thoughts. “You never told me what would happen to us. You just told me that we know each other, and that I’m very _very_ important to you, and… and…” He shakes his head, troubled, looking like his whole world was slowly crumbling away like some ancient masterpiece gone to pot.

Eames takes the opportunity to reach across the table and lay his hand atop Arthur’s, squeezing it gently. He gives Arthur a reassuring smile before the waiter comes over and hurries them up, needing to close the restaurant. Eames pays (even though _Arthur’s_ apparently the Harvard boy whereas Eames just works a deadbeat job nearby) and they leave, walking close, but not too close, through the empty streets. Arthur’s posture is somewhat hunched and his face is set in a pained frown. It makes Eames ache despite himself. Something about Arthur draws him in so entirely, so desperately, and it _grounds_ him. He hasn’t felt the panicked urge to travel since being with him. He’s been so entirely _present_.

Taking his hand, Eames makes him stop and look at him.

“I believe you. Every word of it. And when I told you all that… the older me…  I was right. When I travel to places outside of my own memory, I only travel _home_ , you see. And home, for me, usually manifests itself with the people I love the most. I’ve gone back to when my mum was a child once or twice, but that’s it. The fact that I travel to see you growing up… well, means _you’re_ home to me, at some point. You must be.”

Arthur lights up then, like a brilliant spark in the darkest of nights, and practically knocks Eames off his feet in effort to lean up and kiss him. Eames blinks, but doesn’t pull back, feeling like maybe his heart is lodging itself in his throat. Arthur jolts back bashfully and beams.

“Sorry. Sorry, I just… I missed doing that.”

Eames can’t help but laugh and roll his eyes despite being slightly dazed at just how Arthur feels, tastes…

“Of course I’d travel back just to corrupt the younger version of my life partner. I’ve always been a selfish twat like that.”

Arthur flushes pink and bites at his lips, but the amused grin doesn’t fade from his face.

“You were my first… everything,” he admits. Eames winces but laughs and shakes his head, looking up at the night sky.

“Christ. I _am_ a corrupter…”

“I was eighteen.” Arthur allows a smile to play on his lips, dimples and all. Eames feels himself melting into a puddle of goo but tries to hold himself with dignity regardless.

“Ah,” he concedes, “not so bad, I suppose…”

There’s a moment of almost-comfortable silence between them and Eames can still taste Arthur on his lips. His blood flow redirects itself when he thinks about all the things he’d actually like to do to Arthur at this very moment, like every single molecule in his body suddenly reformed itself around the idea of Arthur.

The words _“my place is just round the corner”_ start to form themselves in the back of his mind as he gathers the courage to actually form them into vocalizations when Arthur speaks and catches him off-guard.

“Your friends, at the bar… who were they?” He tucks his hands into his pockets and Eames lifts a brow.

“Dom Cobb and Mallorie Hughes, respectively.”

“Hughes? I thought she was…”

“French. Her father’s English.” Eames nods for them to keep walking, aiming them conspicuously in the direction of his flat. “I met Mallorie when I was living in London. She was going to Oxford but she was in town for the weekend. Anyway, I was just a boring bum looking for a job and I fell head over heels for her.” He glances down at Arthur, amused, to see Arthur blanch slightly. “It’s all done and over with now. Has been for some time. She never saw me as anything more than a friend. Best friend, in fact. Brother, even… but she got accepted into a doctorate program at Harvard this last year, and I followed her over like the pathetic lost dog I am. She met Dom at some conference for smart psychologists and they’ve been together ever since. He’s alright,” he adds.

Arthur listens attentively, but Eames can tell that he has a real thorn in his side over the news that Eames had feelings for Mal. Eames, in turn, finds this somewhat hilarious, because those feelings had fizzled out years ago, and he’s really only just met this bloke and it seems rather soon for deep-rooted jealousy to take over. But he gets it.

He decides to leave out the fact that Mal and Dom are the only other people alive who know about his… _condition._

Mal by choice. Dom by accident.

“Tell me something about you,” he says instead, sticking his hands in his pockets and giving him a side-long glance.

“Um,” Arthur squints down at his feet for a moment. “I’m double-majoring in music and pre-law. I play the cello.”

“So which do you want to do professionally? Cello or law?”

“Definitely cello. My dad’s a lawyer, hence why I’m taking law classes. He wants that for me, but I don’t like it that much.” A sadness builds in Arthur’s eyes suddenly that Eames feels uncomfortable asking about.

So he shrugs, smiling. “So play cello, then. I’m sure you’re brilliant,”

Arthur pauses contemplatively. “I am.” He looks up and smiles. “You’re the one who suggested I start playing. I was ten and I had no real friends and you said you thought it would suit me…”

He trails off and Eames realizes his expression’s gone a bit harsh. He can’t deny that this is still so strange to him, and Arthur knows he toed over an invisible line just then, just a bit, so he shuts up. Eames shakes his head and smiles.

“Must be a reason for that, then. You must be brilliant when we’re older.” He pauses, slowing his pace. “My flat’s right there,” Eames says softly as they approach. “You can come inside, if you want. Or I can call you a cab…”

“I’d like to come inside,” Arthur looks up at him and _those dimples are going to be the death of me_ , Eames thinks.

“Brilliant,” Eames grins and tugs him through the front door of the building, hoping vaguely that he hasn’t left too many disgusting dishes or dirty clothes lying around. He has to impress his future life partner, after all.

 

**  


_Arthur, Age 15_

_(Eames, older)_

 

Of course, Arthur thinks bitterly as Eames walks out from behind the bushes. He looks younger than the last time he saw him tightly, maybe his late twenties. He’s only seen him a couple of times before in his twenties.

He quickly wipes away his tears and pulls his knees to his chest, the grass damp beneath him, making his shorts uncomfortably wet but he doesn’t really care. Arthur spends every afternoon waiting out here for Eames to show up, and yet he nearly always tends to show nowadays when he’s been crying. It’s humiliating, especially now that he’s fifteen and he’s supposed to be mature and not an awkward and stupid little kid anymore.

“Oh, dove,” Eames frowns in that very soothing way that he does – full of concern and empathy and tenderness – and makes his way over to him with his arms crossed over his chest. He sits beside Arthur and pats his knee, “Tell me what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Arthur insists, but his voice cracks. _I thought I was over fucking puberty_. 

“Well, you and I both know that isn’t true. I probably came back to this moment for a very specific reason. Now tell me,”

Arthur pauses, this new knowledge washing over him. Eames can sense that he needs him from somewhere in the future, maybe. Their bond is stronger than space and time…

“I… I have a crush,” he explains stiffly, “on a boy.” _A crush_ , he thinks, _is a stupid concept compared to what I feel to you, though._

He looks up to find Eames entirely unmoved by this knowledge. Stupidly, Arthur wants to sense some sort of jealousy maybe… something that would make him possessive of Arthur. Instead, he smiles kindly and squeezes his shoulder.

“Well, that’s not so bad to put you in such a strop. Did something else happen?”

“I told Michael, and I thought I could trust him, but he told everyone. He told the whole orchestra. None of them want to talk to me. Especially not him… um, Robert. I heard one of them call me a fag under his breath as I walked by. I have to quit.”

Eames doesn’t hesitate in pulling Arthur in for a firm hug, rubbing his back soothingly.

“Bunch of tossers. You’re lovely and perfect just the way you are, Arthur. Who you love doesn’t define you. In fact, it’s quite a beautiful part of life. So here’s my advice: Don’t quit. Never quit. Unless you’re in bodily harm, keep proving them wrong about you. Besides, you can’t quit orchestra. You’re the most brilliant cello player in the universe. They’re all a bunch of amateurs compared to you, darling.”

Arthur melts against Eames and lets his words wash over him. But he disagrees. He disagrees vehemently. Who he loves absolutely defines him. He loves Eames and that has shaped him into who he is. He lets out a deep breath.

“In the future… am I comfortable with being gay?”

“Yes, quite.” Eames chuckles fondly, ruffling his hair. “And no one gets away with putting you down for it. Trust me. You’re like a firecracker whenever someone tries to pull that shite on you. You take no prisoners.”

Arthur smiles wryly. “Go me.”

They fall into a comfortable silence, Eames’s fingers brushing gently up and down Arthur’s spine in a way that makes him shiver. Arthur allows himself, then, to imagine what it would be like to be with Eames. Be married to Eames. Grow old with Eames. He imagines Eames tracing the same line up his spine but without clothes on, maybe with his lips, maybe in the throes of passion…

So he doesn’t mean to blurt it. He really doesn’t. But he can’t help himself. Eames is there, he’s so present and solid and real and suddenly…

“Are we together in the future? You and I?”

A deep pink blush fills his cheeks. Eames lets out a soft sigh and smiles down at him. He reaches up and pushes some of Arthur’s waves out of his eyes.

“You know I can’t tell you too much about the future, love. It takes away all the fun, all the adventure. I can’t allow you to just live your life waiting for things to happen. They’ll happen when and if they happen.”

Arthur looks down and sniffles. His vulnerability takes over.

“I want us to be together,” he mutters, “always.”

Eames’s hand finds his way into Arthur’s hair and strokes softly.

“You needn’t worry,” he assures him. “You needn’t ever worry,”

When Arthur’s face meets the cool grass below him (because he was leaning literally all of his weight onto Eames) and there’s nothing in his hands but Eames’s clothes – still warm – he lets himself mourn a future he isn’t sure he’s really going to have. He feels horrendously embarrassed for even asking Eames that question… he doesn’t even know if Eames is gay, for pete’s sake. He buries his face into the warm cotton of the shirt Eames wears when he visits and breaths in, trying to memorize the way he smells like something deep and sweet and spicy.

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 25**

**(Arthur, Age 23)**

 

When Arthur graduates with his degree in music performance and his degree in pre-law as well as a small mountain of debt, they get a townhouse together in Boston with big windows and a small kitchen. Eames finds work mainly from home: having to work solid hours at an office job would make it hard for him to explain randomly vanishing in the middle of a meeting. He makes recreations of famous paintings, one of his best talents, and sells them to collectors who can’t afford the real thing. Arthur gets a job at an attorney’s office making copies and putting together case files. He hates it, but it pays.

Their townhouse is tall and brick and is just off of Newberry Street. There’s a tiny garden in the front and old-style streetlights. The moment they walked in Eames knew it was theirs, because he saw the way Arthur’s eyes lit up more and more around every door and corner.

It didn’t take long for Eames to fall for him. It was sort of hard not to, with the knowledge that Arthur was his endgame and all. Still, the trooper that he likes to think he is, he tried very hard to let everything happen naturally. For the first few weeks, he’d limit his seeing Arthur to dates (and limited sleepovers to once a week). Arthur, obviously annoyed at this prospect and wanting to move on, went along with it for his sake. Slowly, _slowly_ , he learned Arthur through and through, up and down like a favorite song. Sometimes, after Arthur would breeze through an explanation at a cursory level, he’d have to remind him gently that he’d never heard that story before. At least, the _present_ him hasn’t. Arthur – eager, brilliant Arthur – caught on after a while, and began making an effort to open himself up to Eames all over again.

Slowly, then, he learns Arthur. He falls for Arthur. _His_ Arthur, not the Arthur he’s convinced he’ll have one day. And he’s beautiful, and incandescent, and the pangs of something deep within him whenever he catches a glimpse at his smile make sense in some otherworldly way, like reading the end of a novel after barely turning the first page.

 “One time you told me you lived in a big house,” Arthur muses after carrying in his last box of stuff from the U-Haul and sitting on it, pulling off a shoe and rubbing at the toe he stubbed on the porch stairs. “I think you were in your early thirties during that visit.”

“Well,” Eames chuckles and glances around their current cramped living space, somehow already made infinitely more charming with Arthur’s keen taste in eclectic interior design, “I suppose then one day I’ll get you your castle. Needn’t worry if it’s already written in the future, hmm?”

“This is a castle enough for me.” Arthur laughs, bright eyed. His lips turn down a bit then and his expression falls contemplative. “Do things change, ever?”

Arthur looks up at him suddenly and Eames barely has time to process. He sighs and sits on the sofa they’d just finished hauling in, patting his knee. Arthur obediently pads across the hardwood and settles himself down in his lap, resting back against him and tilting his chin up to look at him.

“I don’t think so,” Eames sighs. “At least, not from my experience. Things have always happened exactly as my future self has told me they’re going to happen.”

Arthur frowns adorably and buries his face in Eames’s neck.

“Like I said. Needn’t worry, pet,” Eames hums, “It is what it is.”

Arthur looks distant all the sudden, his expression clouding over with unreadable thoughts; troubling thoughts. Eames slides a finger under his chin and kisses the thoughts away, sliding his thumb down the line of Arthur’s jaw.

“Hey,” he coos, smiling. “We’ll be okay.”

Arthur looks into his eyes searchingly, but he can’t keep up the worried act for too long. His expression falters into a smile and he slides his arms around Eames’s neck, leaning in for several long, slow kisses. Eames lets his eyes flutter closed and gets lost.

“We should unpack the bedroom first,” Arthur whispers against his lips.

“Absolutely,” Eames agrees, pinching Arthur’s hip and beaming when he throws his head back and laughs.

 

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 26**

_(Arthur, older)_

 

“Eames?”

Arthur’s voice is very recognizable, and yet not. It’s very definitely Arthur, but slightly rougher, slightly deeper, slightly more even and assured. Eames squints through the darkness and can make out an Arthur-like outline across the room.

Eames was confused when he’d manifested in the middle of some dark house he’s never been in before. It was warm and smelled like balsam candles and mahogany, and outside a thunderstorm raged and he was already dripping wet and shivering from the shower he just left so instead of leaving he’d decided to snoop and look for clothes. He must not have been as quiet as he hoped.

Arthur stands in the doorway of the living room with his arms crossed, a concerned look on his face. Eames blinks and has to fully register what it’s like looking at an aged Arthur. He can see his features outlined by the lightning from outside.

He isn’t _old_ , per say. Probably mid-thirties, somewhere around there. Regardless, he isn’t the bright-eyed 22 year old he’d been in the shower with moments before. He has grey hairs starting to form around his temples and his smile lines have become permanent fixtures around his eyes, becoming the beginnings of crowfeet. It’s then he realizes, very bluntly, that this signifies him officially putting an anchor down with Arthur. He’s traveled somewhere he’s never even been before, somewhere completely unrecognizable to him, straight to Arthur. Future Arthur, even, an Arthur he isn’t sure he knows. Arthur was _his_ home, now, too.

But _this_ home, with its cream colored walls, modern furniture and high windows is foreign to him. And this Arthur is foreign to him too. He seems thinner in some ways, but more built in others. His shoulders are a little bulkier – as are his arms – but his waist is narrow and his cheek bones are a bit more hollowed out. He has dark circles under his eyes and his hair’s mussed, like he’s just woken up. Eames notes that Arthur’s tendency to be the heaviest sleeper known to man must wear off eventually.

“Um, ‘ello Arthur,” Eames scrubs a hand through his hair. “Happen to have some clothes lying around I could potentially borrow?”

Arthur has a strange look in his eyes; something desperate and vulnerable and hard. He doesn’t answer, so Eames shifts uncomfortably to rest his weight on his other foot and makes to say something else. The way Arthur looks, pained yet withdrawn, makes Eames want to smooth the harsh lines of his face and whisper soothing things into the nape of his neck.

He takes a step forward to maybe consider doing so, hand outstretched in worry, mouth slightly agape with unspoken questions, when Arthur crosses the room in three quick strides and pins him up against a wall, kissing him deeply, desperately.

And then Eames’s mind does the thing it normally does when Arthur kisses him with a hidden purpose: fills with a million worried questions, putters, malfunctions, then shuts off entirely except for the primal, instinctual stuff like running his hands over Arthur’s body and muttering filthy things in his ear. Arthur has an uncanny knack for playing Eames as well as he plays his cello, and _this_ Arthur certainly has had many more years of practice. Before Eames has time to think, Arthur is yanking him in the direction of what will probably be the bedroom, _their_ bedroom, Eames assumes.

_I guess the older me is definitely not home, then._

Arthur makes short work of removing his clothes (flannel pajama bottoms and a very un-Arthurian shirt with a loud pattern that’s much too broad for him across the shoulders and chest, Eames notes) before all but falling into bed with him. Arthur’s hands are much more practiced, much more assured, when he touches Eames now. Eames feels every new callous against his skin, and searches Arthur’s body for changes as well with his own hands, noting every new scar and line. Arthur hoovers over him, his eyes hungry and a little wet, and matches Eames’s gaze before sweeping his sight down his body to his now quite obvious erection laying against his belly.

Lightning quick, as if possessed suddenly by some deep ancient desire, Arthur snatches a bottle of lube off the bedside table and soon (practiced), he’s sinking down onto him and Eames chokes out a moan, surprised at the lack of foreplay as well as how surprisingly okay with that he is. He figures Arthur must have worked himself open before he’d even arrived. The thought of that sends shivers down his spine and makes him surge up into him excitedly, his hips bucking with a couple of shallow thrusts that make Arthur hiss.

Making love with Arthur at this age is different, but lovely. Arthur’s a little less vocal, maybe, and a little more direct in his actions. Mature. Shagging _his_ Arthur is mostly full of panted giggles and awkward fumbling, which is plenty fun in its own right, but _this_ , Eames thinks, _this is bone-deep._

Eames could get used to shagging Arthur like this, he muses, as Arthur looks straight into his eyes with intensity and _fire_ and Eames digs his fingers into Arthur’s hips, driving him further and harder down onto his length. Arthur tosses his head back and Eames follows the sharp lines of his neck and chest with his eyes, feeling a fire burn inside of him when Arthur starts to let out a string of whispered curses and panted moans.

Eames feels something clench inside of him; something deep and untouched and wanton. He sits, gripping Arthur’s thighs and pushing him back down onto the bed, pressing him into the sheets and slamming home with reckless abandon. Arthur lets out a puff of air and a string of nonsense and before too long he’s throwing his head back and squeezing his eyes shut, his mouth frozen in a silent scream as his orgasm tears through him. The sight of it makes Eames go into a frenzy, yelping out Arthur’s name as his own climax hits him like a freight train. He buries himself deep inside of Arthur as it happens, trembling with the effort to stay somewhat upright.

When it’s over, the rigidness in Arthur’s spine falters and he curls up beside Eames, burying his face in his the slick skin at his temple. He breathes softly. Eames noses along his jaw and takes in the scent of his unfamiliar aftershave, the sensation of the slight stubble gracing his skin there. The uncanniness of it all makes him feel sated and skittish all at once.

“I remember this,” Arthur says finally, his tone deep and even. “I remember you showing up back home and telling me that you slept with an older me. I got jealous. I used to get jealous of myself all the time. In my parents’ backyard, even. Ridiculous, really.”

“Understandable,” Eames chuckles, turning so his lips are pressing against Arthur’s temple.

Arthur falls silent again and Eames sighs, carding his fingers through his beginning-to-grey hair.

“What’s got you in a strop, then? Hmm?” he asks as softly as he can, and there’s silence for a moment before Arthur – the bastard – bursts out in a fit of quiet laughter. It’s so sudden it completely throws Eames for a loop. One minute older Arthur is the picture of stony-faced seriousness, and the next he’s _shaking_ he’s laughing so hard. And when Arthur laughs it’s like being blinded by the sun, dimples like a mirage in the most scorching desert, so Eames has to take a moment to simply stare at him in shock before allowing himself to catch his contagious smile.

“I forgot how crass and ballsy you are at this age. I like it.” Arthur looks up at the ceiling and his smile falters ever so slightly, his face illuminated only by the lightning storm outside. “You’ve been gone for two weeks now. It’s terrifying. There’s a part of me that knows you’re okay… if you weren’t I think you’d have come back to me. And I know you. I know wherever you are, you’re probably trying everything in the book to come back to me. You’re probably sticking your head near microwaves and sitting in television stores and skydiving and getting drunk or something…”

“’Course I am,” Eames chuckles. “And it’ll work. But two weeks… Christ. I didn’t know that was possible,”

“Something about getting older,” Arthur explains, “it makes your trips longer. I don’t know.” He looks over at Eames and Eames thinks he can see the trace of tears in his eyes. “I just miss you. It’s so hard to _exist_ without you. I don’t know how I even survived the four years after the last time I saw you at my parents’ house with my sanity intact.”

“Hardly. You jumped me like a baboon in heat when you saw me at the bar on Halloween,” Eames grins cheekily and Arthur grins up at the ceiling, his eyes growing distant but not any less warm, as if he’s remembering.

“Well,” he says softly, brushing his hand over his face, “I hope seeing your future husband as a decrepit old man hasn’t scared you away too much,”

“Quite the contrary, pet. I quite adore salt-and-pepper, crow’s feet Distinguished Arthur. Drives me wild, just like the young, sassy, shit-eating-grin Arthur that I must return to soon. You’re probably having a fit and slamming things around as you put the Turkish take-out leftovers away. We were in the shower fooling around when…”

“Oh, I remember,” Arthur laughs, cupping Eames’s face and leaning in for a soft kiss. “And I’ll get over it. I always do,”

Eames looks up at the ceiling and takes a deep gulp of air, letting it out through his nose.

“This is the first time I’ve traveled forward,” he informs Arthur quietly and Arthur just frowns in response. He feels Arthur run his long fingers up over his chest soothingly, circling one of his nipples before outlining each of his ribs individually.

“You never really travel forward that often,” Arthur responds in a coded voice that makes Eames nervous. He looks over to see Arthur staring out the window into the rain, his eyes growing incredibly distant and _sad_. “Maybe it’s just when I need you the most.”

Seeing Arthur sad is one of the worst things Eames can fathom. It somehow manages to block out all the light and feels like the whole world is crumbling to pieces when it happens, so he acts quickly.

“Well I don’t mind, because I kind of like trading in cheeky bugger Arthur for older, wiser Arthur for a bit. I’m not kidding, love, the grey is truly driving me bloody mental.”

Arthur cracks a smile and turns his head back to look into his eyes warmly, just as Eames calculated he would, because no matter how much time has passed this is _Arthur_ , after all. And Eames _knows_ Arthur. Every nook and cranny, every footnote, every spinning book-shelf type secret passageway in his mind.

“This was nice,” Arthur nearly whispers, his dimples faceting themselves onto his cheeks without the smile being fully present. “It helped with the whole ‘missing you’ thing…”

“He’ll be back,” Eames nuzzles against Arthur, feeling strange talking about himself in the third person but not quite being able to connect himself with this older stranger who bears the same name, the same love for Arthur… “Trust me. He will always, always come back to _you_.”

Eames witnesses something inside of Arthur snap a bit, his smile vanishing as fast as it came, his face becoming slightly broken and wistful and twisting up in an unusual way, but that all fades in a blur of spinning shadows and heat and he finds himself back in the bathroom of their apartment, damp and dark now. He hears the blare of reality television coming from the bedroom and smiles to himself, but can’t shake the look on the older Arthur’s face: anxiety, apprehension, disbelief.

He swallows hard and straightens his back, conjuring up a winning smile before stepping out into the bedroom.

 

**

 

**Arthur, Age 24**

**(Eames, Age 26)**

 

“I think we have the wrong friends,” Arthur says over the music into Eames’s ear when he passes by him on his way to get another beer. Ariadne and Yusuf’s place is tiny and carpeted, making the room packed with far too many bodies to make it a comfortable party, while also making it swelteringly hot. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of his birthday or the fact that he was just hired into the Boston Philharmonic and was able to turn in his two weeks’ notice at the law office, but he and Ariadne always disagreed when it came to celebrations.

It takes him a few seconds to even find Eames, where he is leaning against the wall with Yusuf having insightful conversations about the merits of tea and the best way to cheat at blackjack.

“I think you’re right, love,” Eames quips cheerfully. “I think we ought to trade.”

Arthur laughs and moves to the kitchen, fishing another beer out of the cooler full of mostly-melted ice and popping off the cap with Yusuf’s lucky bottle opener, conveniently placed on the kitchen counter. When he walks back into the living room, Eames snakes an arm around his waist and halts his progress, pulling him in close and pressing a kiss to his temple. Arthur grins and tucks his face against his chest, feeling sufficiently tipsy and warm. He doesn’t listen to what Eames says, but rather closes his eyes and feels the vibration of his words as he speaks, clashed against the sound of his heart thrumming through the alcohol and the heat.

Eames clears his throat, which piques Arthur’s attention slightly.

“So Yusuf,” he says, “what field of medicine are you studying for your post-doc, again?”

“Mutations. Genes, that is.” Yusuf says passively, always so unnecessarily humble. Arthur wonders if maybe he truly thinks his life is just _that_ boring to other people. “Mainly, I specialize in patients with rare gene mutations and perform a lot of surgeries and tests on them. Write a lot of journals on my research.”

“He’s basically a genius!” Ariadne shouts from across the room and Yusuf sticks out his tongue at her playfully.

“Ah…” Eames trails off and looks down a bit. Arthur looks up at him at the same moment he feels cold hand on his shoulder. He looks down to find Mal smiling wryly with a glint of humor in her dark eyes.

“Cedric,” she says as she tilts her half-full mason jar of wine at him, “it is rather creepy that you placed all of your affections on the male version of _me_.”

Eames laughs, and Arthur’s brain malfunctions indignantly, his lips turning into a neat frown and his spine going stiff.

“I don’t think you’re anything like Arthur,” Dom says as he walks up behind his fiancée. “You’ve got a _much_ better taste in men.”

Eames reaches over and playfully swats at Cobb’s arm, and they all laugh. Arthur frowns.

He likes Mal a lot, despite himself. She’s icy and cryptic to people she doesn’t know, and blindingly warm and blunt to people she does. She always says whatever she wants to with no regard for others’ feelings or perceptions, and Arthur is all at once intimidated by and utterly in awe of it. And she _likes_ him. She liked him immediately. They bonded over films and music and wines… and he _likes_ her, but there’s something about her that makes him wary. He doesn’t like to think of it as being something having to do with a sort of latent jealousy he has for her being Eames’s _first_ love. It never amounted to anything, of course, but Arthur still feels a sort of chasm open inside of him. It feels selfishly like failure.

He takes a long swig of his beer and pulls away from Eames’s sure grip, walking over to the sofa where Ariadne’s perched, playing DJ and trying to find the next CD to put in.

She glances over at him and, in her extremely intuitive and eloquent way, mutters, “What jagged object has lodged itself up your asshole?”

Arthur rolls his eyes and doesn’t answer immediately. She shrugs and goes back to her CD scouting, but he sighs melodramatically and leans back against the cushions and she smirks at him with narrowed eyes, victorious.

“Something _is_ the matter. Really, Arthur, you forget that I _know_ you. So shoot.”

Arthur purses his lips at her, his resolve to be frustrated with her weak. Instead he gives in and leans in close.

“Mal made some comment about how Eames fell for me because I’m a male version of _her_ , which is such bullshit because I’m _not_. Just because we both like Truffaut and Bresson films and have dark hair and dark eyes…”

“You _are_ similar. She’s way hotter than you, though.” Ariadne laughs at the daggers Arthur shoots her. “Kidding. That was kind of a fucked up thing for her to say to you.”

“Eames isn’t with me because I’m like _her_ ,” Arthur all but growls, finishing the rest of his beer before wedging the empty bottle in the crevice between the couch cushions beside him.

He almost lets the words tumble out of his mouth:

_He’s with me because he’s meant to be with me._

But he stops himself. This is something Ariadne could never understand, he thinks. She’s an idealist mixed with a hardcore realist. She loves watching movies about true love but laughs in the face of the debate of whether or not it can be real.

“Of course he isn’t, Arthur.” She frowns then, leaning in and pecking his cheek. “He’s with you because you’re _you_. Obviously.”

Arthur looks up at her and smiles, pulling her in for a hug. She and Yusuf moved fast with each other after they initially got together. The wedding’s in just over eight months and then she and Yusuf will probably start popping out spawn and Arthur isn’t sure he’ll survive not having ready access to her every single moment of the day. Kids complicate things. Life complicates things.

She was the brightest thing in his life for so long, and having to live for so long without Eames rooted a deep fear of change in him. He thinks of the first time they met when he was a depressed eighteen year old, terrified of living alone, going to school and being lonely. She was wild and fierce and hilarious and she pulled Arthur into her whirlwind of a life with little to no reason to, but he’s so grateful that she did. He’s grateful for all of it.

“You okay now?” she mutters against his shoulder.

“Yes,” he chuckles, pulling back and pecking her hair. He looks around and realizes that most of the party had left, the “party ‘til we die” mentality apparently having been replaced with a “home before midnight, in time to pay the sitter and put the kids down” mentality, which Arthur finds deeply disturbing.

Arthur looks around to find Eames, and is relieved when he does. He’s in the kitchen with Mal, whispering something in her ear. She listens with a solemn face and nods before whispering something back. He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders, pulling away from her and walking towards the living room.

“Ariadne, my darling! You must let us stay and help you clean up!” he says grandly, arms spread wide with a grin stretched across his face. Arthur recognizes the way he walks slightly diagonally as a sign that he’s a bit drunk.

“If you insist,” Ariadne laughs and stands up, patting Eames on the chest before going over to where Yusuf is setting out cat food.

Arthur stands and goes and mutters into his ear.

“You alright?”

“Me? Love, I’m perfectly fine.” Eames wraps a sly arm around Arthur’s waist, grabbing his hand and starting trying to dance stupidly with him. Arthur rolls his eyes but laughs despite himself.

“You’re drunk.”

“Mmmm,” is Eames’s reply.

“Cedric, sit down and drink some water,” Mal says in a warning tone. Arthur’s alarmed at how grave she sounds. Eames’s face hardens. Arthur looks between them, his eyebrow furrowed.

“C’mon, babe,” Dom tugs Mal out of the apartment, closing the door behind him. Arthur turns to Eames with a frown and Eames shakes his head, pecking his neck and continuing to try and make them sway to no music. He’s stiffer now, and Arthur can sense that he’s upset by something Mal said or did.

“What was that about?” Arthur mutters.

“Nothing. I’m fine.” His voice comes out hoarse and it shocks Arthur enough to try and pull back. Eames responds by gripping him tighter – too tight – digging his fingers into Arthur’s skin. Arthur winces and pushes him away.

“Eames, _ow_ , stop!” he gasps and looks up at him. Eames is suddenly pale and sweaty and his eyes are searching and terrified. Arthur blinks and shakes his head.

“No no no… _Eames_ …”

He grips his shoulders like he can prevent him from going. Like it’ll make a single shred of difference. Before he can finish the thought, Eames is gone. He vanishes and leaves nothing but his shirt in Arthur’s hands, still warm and a bit damp from sweat. Arthur blinks down at it, stunned, and looks up to see both Ariadne and Yusuf standing on the other side of the room. Ariadne screams. Yusuf stays deadly silent, his eyes wide.

Arthur takes a step toward them before sighing and looking down, not having the energy to explain. He doesn’t know why he’s so upset.

Eames hasn’t traveled in a couple of weeks. He thinks, maybe, he was beginning to forget that it even happened at all. He sits on the couch and buries his face in Eames’s shirt, closing his eyes.

“Alcohol must make it worse…” he whispers. “I feel like such an idiot for not realizing.”

He wants to call Mal and scream at her for never telling him that alcohol makes it worse. When Eames told him that both Mal and Dom were in on his secret, he made it seem like it was all only in a periphery way. Mal had found out because Eames traveled right in front of her when they were still in their early twenties, and Dom had found out because Mal can’t keep secrets from him. He feels betrayed, slightly. He feels like they were treating him like a child – too fragile to understand – in not telling him details like this. In whispering about it without him like they’re afraid he’ll have some sort of negative reaction if he hears it, instead of being able to help.

He’s met with silence for a long moment before suddenly, in a flash, Ariadne is in front of him, hands on his knees, forcing him to look up at her.

“Arthur,” she says in a shaky but level voice, “what the _fuck_ was that?”

Arthur looks up and her warily, trying to conjure up the energy to lie, but he realizes quickly that even if that energy somehow existed inside of him, there is no lie that could possibly explain what they witnessed.

He looks over her shoulder at Yusuf, who’s still silent and leaning against the door frame, his hand firmly placed over his lips.

“Well,” Arthur starts, “Eames is a time traveler.”

There’s silence again for a long moment. Ariadne sits back on her heels, staring at the ground. Arthur turns his head and looks out the window down at the city, admiring the amber glow of the city’s nightlife casting long shadows against the grates of their balcony.

“Do you know the cause?” Yusuf says, breaking the silence. His tone is quiet and contemplative, but slightly shaky underneath it all.

“No,” Arthur shakes his head, “it started when he was a kid. He can’t control it. He goes back to places in his life that are important… places in _our_ lives…”

“Eames visited you before you came to school…” Ariadne whispers like she’s just put all the pieces of some mystery together which only she was privy to. “That’s why things changed so quickly when you met him. You were _waiting_ for him.”

Arthur nods, rubbing a hand against his forehead and taking a deep breath.

There’s silence for a while again, only this time Ariadne stares at him with sad eyes and Yusuf goes to sit on the arm of the couch. Arthur feels suddenly very uncomfortable.

“Do you think,” Yusuf starts, scraping his fingernails against his stubble, “he would be willing to come in for some tests?”

Arthur looks up sharply, his frown deepening.

“I don’t know,” he says exasperatedly, “we haven’t talked about…”

“I deal with the mutation of genes, Arthur. This could apply. This fascinates me from a medical and scientific standpoint, but it also concerns me as your friend. He asked me twice tonight what I was studying, and seemed pensive afterward, so I think he thinks I might be able to help him as well. When he returns, would you ask him if he’d like to come in and let me run some tests?”

Arthur leans back and looks up at the ceiling. He knows that there isn’t a cure for at least ten years, because he’s fairly sure the oldest Eames ever was when he visited him as his house in Middlesex, Vermont was around mid to late thirties. But after that…

Something inside of Arthur clenches in agonizing fear, because he realizes that either they _do_ find a cure, or…

“Yes, I’ll talk to him,” he says quietly.

Ariadne slides onto the couch beside him and wraps her arms around his waist, hugging him close. He sighs and leans into her, closing his eyes.

 

**

 

_Arthur, Age 18_

_(Eames, older)_

 

Arthur has a wonderful 18th birthday.

He didn’t particularly expect to. He’d woken up with a headache and the normal sense of dread about impending graduation sitting in his stomach like a sledge hammer.

His parents gifted him a night of shenanigans with his friends and jumped ship, going to stay with his aunt and uncle for the night so he and his friends can get drunk and eat pizza and play spin the bottle. By the time his friends go home, the alcohol’s mostly worn off, leaving him just feeling warm and happy.

He pulls on his favorite hoodie before going back into the kitchen. He packs up the leftover pizza before shoving the boxes into a trash bag along with the assortment of red solo cups and napkins. Yawning, he slides his sneakers on and makes his way outside and around to their outdoor trash bin, propped up next to their garage.

After he places the bag inside the can and closes the lid, he hears the gravel behind him crunch and he nearly jumps out of his skin.

He whips around, eyes wide but reflexes slow, and stares as he sees Eames approaching him.

“Sorry I scared you, love,” he whispers. He looks cold in his dad’s tight short-sleeved shirt. He rubs ruefully at his arms and gives Arthur a lopsided smile.

Arthur lets out a surprised breath and lights up all at once like a firecracker, closing the space between them and leaping into Eames’s arms, wrapping his arms around his neck tightly and grinning.

“What an amazing birthday present!” he can’t help but say, no matter how dumb he knows it sounds in his head. Despite sounding like the little boy protagonist of a 50’s feel-good movie, his heart is leaping out of his chest and he feels like he could _cry_.

This is what he wished for when he blew out the candles on the red velvet cake his friend Abby made him.

“Oi! Well happy birthday, Arthur.” Eames smiles his usual winning smile and brushes his lips against Arthur’s temple. “How old…?”

Arthur steps back and takes in Eames hungrily. He isn’t the oldest nor the youngest that he’s seen him. Arthur guesses he’s in his early thirties. It’s a good age for him.

“Eighteen,” Arthur says with a chuckle, “I can now officially vote and buy cigarettes and join the army. All on my to-do list, of course.”

Eames chuckles, still hushed, and shakes his head.

“Christ, you’d do well in the military, actually. You’re the most anal, organized human alive… and you do have a knack for bossing people around…” He chuckles at Arthur’s quirked brow. “It’s a compliment, honest.”

“Uh-huh,” Arthur smirks and rolls his eyes. He notices that Eames starts to shiver.

“Hey,” he says softly, “my parents are gone for the night. Let’s go inside. I’ll find you some warmer clothes.”

Eames looks unsurely past him into the light of the garage before nodding. Arthur leads him inside and up the stairs to his bedroom. Eames follows without too much unsureness, and Arthur can tell that he’s been inside this house before, in another time.

“Have you been inside before?” Arthur asks casually, motioning for Eames to make himself at home on his bed while he digs through his closet for any sort of baggy clothes.

“In a different time,” Eames sighs softly, but falls silent. Arthur purses his lips and tries not to resent how much Eames is always trying to conceal the future from him. Some moments he’s so sure of their future together… how could Eames look at him like that if they _didn’t_ have a future together? But then other times it all seems like some sort of cryptic mystery and he loses all solid footing he has on the promise of their life together. He’s imagined a million different scenarios in which they _aren’t_ together in the future. He tries not to get his hopes up too much.

“It was probably cleaner when you saw it,” Arthur says as he pulls one of his friend’s jackets that got left a few years ago out of the bottom of his dresser. He tosses it at Eames and Eames pulls it on gratefully.

“A bit,” he answers, “less posters of young Harrison Ford…” He smirks at Arthur and Arthur rolls his eyes, flopping down on the bed beside him.

“Shut up,” he deadpans with a smile on his face. He looks over at Eames, whose face is turned toward the window in pensive thought.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he says softly, and Eames turns to face him again and smiles.

“I think tonight will be the last time I visit you,” he says softly, sadly, “until we meet in real time.”

Arthur feels like all of the air is sucked out of his lungs and replaced with concrete. He stares up at Eames, horrorstruck. _This can’t be happening…_

“But… _no_ ,” Arthur sits up and faces him, folding his legs, his eyes wide and alarmed. “Eames… what? No. How long? But…”

“A while,” Eames sighs and takes both of his hands. He pauses, frowning, before turning both of his hands over and pulling them up, pressing a kiss to each palm. Arthur watches him closely, his heart pounding and his eyes wetting with desperate tears.

“But _I need you_ ,” Arthur’s voice wavers and he boldly puts his hands on either side of Eames’s face, “Eames. _You can’t leave me_.”

“It’s only temporary,” Eames says quietly, a smile playing on his lips. Arthur wants to punch it off and kiss it off all at once. _How can he leave me?!_

“Arthur,” Eames says sternly as the tears start to break past the barrier of Arthur’s waterline and slide down his cheeks, “you _will_ see me again. You know that, right?”

“But in what context? How? You won’t recognize me. I have to make you know me.” Arthur feels on the verge of hyperventilation, “And I don’t even know if we’ll be together. I don’t know anything. I could be your accountant for all I know. I could mean _nothing_ to you…”

“Oh Arthur,” Eames is speaking softly now, so softly. Arthur opens his mouth to protest more, he wants to yell and scream and cry, but before he can even gather the energy for any of those actions Eames’s lips are on his and time stops.

Arthur is floating through time and space. He wonders if he’s dreaming, if there’s any reality where this could _possibly_ be really happening. But Arthur’s learned never to question reality. Eames’s mouth is hot and soft against his own and he thinks immediately to the joking kisses he’d shared with his friends playing spin-the-bottle earlier that night and how now those all seem so childish, so immature. This is different. He surges forward despite himself, his arms flying around Eames’s neck and his fingers tangling themselves into Eames’s hair. He kisses back enthusiastically, every nerve ending in his body lighting like a live wire, electricity pulsing through his veins.

“Eames,” he mumbles with numb, swollen lips, “ _Eames_ ,”

“Hush, pet. I’ve got you,” Eames whispers back, gently laying him down on the bed and pressing himself down on top of him.

Arthur whimpers, his mind malfunctioning and forgetting the entire English language as well as how to breathe. He moves his hands over every part of Eames’s body he can reach and Eames slides his mouth in open kisses down Arthur’s jaw and neck, working on carefully removing his clothes.

Soon Arthur’s entirely nude and he feels suddenly self-conscious. He’d forgotten until this moment that he’s not only a virgin but _painfully_ a virgin, and no one’s ever seen him naked before, and _oh my god, it’s Eames, Eames is seeing me naked._

Eames sits back and admires him with a gaze that’s equal parts adoring and wanton. Arthur looks down and feels his cheeks burn when he sees his cock already rock hard and laying against his belly. Eames must see his embarrassment because he lets out a brief burst of exasperated laughter and takes Arthur’s arm, pressing a kiss to the pulse in his wrist.

“You’re beautiful.” Eames assures him, eyeing him earnestly; grey eyes looking more like clouds than their normal stone. “And if you want me to, I’d like to make love to you.”

Arthur wants to weep he’s so relieved and excited. His rigid flesh gives a twitch at the thought and it doesn’t escape Eames’s attention. He laughs and reaches down, wrapping his fingers around his length and giving him two firm strokes. Arthur keens and props himself up on his arms, entirely oversensitive and overeager.

“Yes,” Arthur nods fervently and looks into Eames’s eyes before looking back down at where Eames’s hand is moving on him, “God, _yes_ , please… it’s all I’ve ever wanted… well, since I knew what sex was…”

Eames grins crookedly and slides a finger under Arthur’s chin, tilting it forward so he can kiss him languidly as he continues to give his cock soft, brief jerks. Arthur gasps with every one into his mouth for emphasis. He reaches forward blindly and tugs at the fabric of the clothes Eames is, much to Arthur’s horror, still wearing. Eames chuckles fondly and pushes Arthur back down onto the bed before sitting back on his knees and carefully taking off every piece of clothing.

Arthur’s technically seen Eames naked before, but only in periphery glances. Eames usually is very skilled at ducking behind the bushes to dress, no matter how many times Arthur, hormonal and naive, tried to spy on him. He once saw Eames’s ass and the back of his balls as he pulled one leg into the sweat pants, and it gave Arthur enough jerk-off material for the next two years. But now Eames is _here_ and Eames is _touching him_ and Arthur doesn’t feel even a little bit guilty about how greedily he watches him remove his clothes. When Eames finally tugs off his sweats, Arthur feels like he’s going to actually _die_ from how turned on he is. Eames is well-endowed ( _of course he fucking is_ ) and Arthur can’t help but wonder if it’s actually going to fit inside of him.

 _Challenge fucking accepted_ , he thinks.

“ _Ohmygodfuckme_ ,” The words spill out of Arthur’s mouth in a rush as Eames moves back over him.

“Getting there, sweetheart. Patience.” Eames whispers into the shell of his ear and Arthur nearly sobs.

And in an instant he’s moving. Eames is pushing him back down onto the mattress and spreading his legs and mumbling sweet nothings as he rubs his hands up and down his thighs. He looks up at Arthur and locks eyes with him, his eyes soft but caring.

“Are you sure?” he asks quietly, because he needs to.

“Yes.” Arthur breathes, nearly incensed that he has to actually ask.

And so Eames does.

It takes eons, or at least it does to Arthur. He knows it’s brand new to him and he knows Eames knows how to take care of him, so he takes the time to open him up properly with his fingers, and then his mouth. Arthur comes apart easily, reducing into nothing but a mushy pile of moaning, sobbing goo. He barely knows up from down by the time Eames takes his own length into his hand and aligns it.

Arthur squeezes his eyes shut and waits, every part of his body alive and pulsing, but it doesn’t come. For the briefest of seconds he’s terrified Eames has gone and he’s going to _scream_ , but when he opens his eyes he’s still there.

“You never asked if I was safe or not,” Eames mutters lowly. He looks up at Arthur and lifts an eyebrow, a frown carving itself into his face. Arthur reddens and glares.

“ _Eames_ ,” Arthur growls, “I’m not an idiot. I don’t go around getting all the boys to fuck me bare. I _trust you_ , and I _know_ you wouldn’t do it if you weren’t clean.”

“Promise if me if you ever do this with anyone else, you’ll ask.” Eames says lightly, though he hasn’t moved from his ready position. “You’ll make sure there’s protection involved.”

“ _Do I_ ever do it with anyone else?” Arthur challenges, leaning up on his elbows with an eyebrow quirked defiantly.

Eames simply glares weakly as if to say, _I’m not telling, and you know I’m not telling_ , and Arthur groans and falls back against the pillows.

“I promise. Now please, please, _please_ fuck me before I’m forced to _actually_ murder you.”

Eames laughs.

“Always such a needy bottom,” he tisks. Arthur tries to think of a retort, and then gets distracted by the implication that Eames _knows_ what kind of a bottom he is…

And then, pain.

At first it’s all he can think of, but soon it dissolves into nothing but a dull ache, and then even that’s covered up entirely by every nerve ending in his body buzzing with pleasure.

“There you go, love. You’re doing beautifully.” Eames mumbles. Arthur misses having something to kiss, so he bites down on his lip instead and watches him as he moves over him and inside of him. Arthur’s vision blurs with pleasure so he closes his eyes and listens to the ruckus of his heart slamming against his ribcage mixed with the sound of slick skin slapping against skin and Eames panting and mumbling curse words under his breath.

Eames has a look on his face of concentration mixed with tenderness and it makes something inside of Arthur pang. _I’m in love with him_ , Arthur thinks, even though he already knows this.

 _I can’t lose him_ , is his next thought.

“Eames,” Arthur gasps when he feels Eames brush against some part of him that makes him feel like he’s floating through space. Eames responds with a flash of a grin.

It ends too fast, despite Arthur trying his very best to hold back and keep it going forever. Eames makes sure Arthur comes first, urging him on quietly and stroking him with a practiced rhythm. Once Eames makes sure Arthur is well and truly over the edge, he speeds up and Arthur feels him stutter once, twice, and then still, the muscles against his rubs and in his shoulders flexing tightly before relaxing entirely. Eames rolls to his side and pulls Arthur with him, resting him on top of him and stroking his hair as they both lay in silence and listen to the clashing sounds of their harsh breathing.

No words are spoken for a while. Arthur wants to memorize every single emotion, every single sensation. He knows he’ll need it to tide him over until he can find Eames again.

Arthur starts to feel sleepy after a while. Eames plays with his hair absently, and Arthur closes his eyes and allows himself a lazy smile.

“I got accepted to Harvard today,” he says quietly, “I haven’t told anyone yet. I got the letter after my parents left.”

He looks up at Eames, resting his chin against his chest. Eames looks down at him through his thick lashes and smiles.

“I hope you aren’t nervous,” he takes a lock of Arthur’s hair between his fingers and twists it gently, “because you really do have a good time at Harvard. Oh, and congratulations, of course.”

Arthur smiles knowingly, and rests his head against his chest once again, closing his eyes.

“It’s a bit scary, but if you say I’ll enjoy it, then I’ll enjoy it.”

Eames hums in response, and falls silent again.

Something inside of him clenches unpleasantly when he realizes Eames could be gone at any minute.

“Eames,” he says quietly, “when do I see you again?”

Eames pauses and stays silent for a moment. Arthur frowns and looks at the wall while he waits for an answer. Eames brushes his fingers up Arthur’s spine and then along his jaw, urging him to look at him.

“The next time you see me won’t be for a few years. But I won’t know you. You have to make sure I know you, Arthur. Don’t go easy on me.”

Arthur smiles a bit.

“I never go easy on you.”

Eames laughs and hauls him up for another kiss. Arthur feels himself slipping out of consciousness, and he fights it, but it’s a losing battle. He’s too warm, too comfortable, and his entire body feels like it does after a rigorous workout: stretched out and flimsy. He closes his eyes for what he promises himself will just be a moment, but when he opens his eyes again he’s met with morning light and an empty bed.

The world becomes a thousand shades less bright. He turns his face into the pillow and allows himself to mourn something he hasn’t even really had yet.

The next time he sees Eames, he knows he’ll have to fight for it. It terrifies him.

 

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 27**

**(Arthur, Age 25)**

Yusuf sits down at his desk so suddenly and so out of nowhere Eames nearly jumps right out of his skin. Arthur stiffens in his chair, his face going stony pale but his eyebrows shooting up like rockets. His office is cold and devoid of any and all color. Doctor Yusuf, as far as Eames can tell, is much different than normal Yusuf. He doesn’t quite have all the formalities of a real practicing doctor yet, given that he’s two years into his post-doctorate research and basically staking it out at a hospital that will let him work while also sending off lengthy studies to medical journals.

He’s also thirteen months into putting Eames through various uncomfortable (and sometimes painful) tests. But today’s the “eureka” day, according to the rushed email he received earlier.

Yusuf takes off his wire-framed glasses and rubs his eyes.

“Well, the good news is, we did find something,” Yusuf says evenly, replacing the glasses on his face and peering over them at them. “An abnormality. The bad news is, we have no idea what it is. You have a very rare anomaly in your DNA… in your genetic code. I’ve never seen it before… and no one I’ve spoken to or researched has heard of it before either…”

“Can we treat it?” Arthur suddenly stands, leaning over Yusuf’s desk like a cat eying a mouse and Yusuf shrinks.

“Possibly. There are certainly things we can try. Mutations are never curable, but they are treatable sometimes. If we can find out what triggers the traveling spells, we can suppress that and prevent it from happening. And I’m going to try everything. Though, Eames, we need your permission to essentially be a lab rat. You’re going to be the newest example of revolutionary science. I could even win the Nobel Prize…”

Arthur narrows his eyes, fingers clenched white against the wood of Yusuf’s desk.

“All you can think about is winning a _fucking_ Nobel Prize? Your wife is my best friend. I can and will make your life a _living hell…_ ”

Eames stands too and puts a hand on the small of Arthur’s back, smiling reassuringly.

“I’m happy to be your lab rat, Yusuf. As long as you don’t make me sprout a second head or something of the like.”

“No guarantees,” Yusuf jokes, and Arthur absolutely _hisses_.

Yusuf eyes Arthur wearily, possibly registering that he’s never seen his friend resemble a feral cat quite so much before, but he nods.

“I’ll do my best and I won’t harm a hair on your head. It’ll be a long, uncomfortable road ahead, but there is a road ahead.”

“That’s the important thing,” Eames says for Arthur more than himself.

Arthur settles back on his heels and shrinks visibly, nodding and turning to bury his face in Eames’s shoulder. Eames brings a hand up Arthur’s back, fingers trailing along the subtle bumps of his spine before pausing to massage circles into the back of his neck.

He leads him out of the office after he and Yusuf work out a schedule for things to start, more tests to be run and more bloodwork to be taken. Arthur’s stiff and jumpy, Eames notes, but he keeps his hand firmly splayed at the small of his back.

“It’ll be okay, darling,” he murmurs into his ear. “We’ll get through this, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Arthur echoes, but his eyes suggest that he is somewhere else entirely.

 

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 30**

**(Arthur, Age 28)**

 

When Eames lays down in the bed, Arthur opens his red-rimmed eyes in relief. He turns around in Eames’s arms and latches onto him tightly. Eames strokes his fingers through his hair.

Eames takes a glance out the window and sees that the quiet Vermont morning mist is lacing through the trees, the sun barely peaking up over the distant horizon. His eyes scan across the room, then, pausing on the two perfectly pressed tuxedos hanging from the door frame, one dark and cut perfectly at the waist with a dark red handkerchief, and one broader, light grey and with a green handkerchief.

He wants to cry in relief.

 _I haven’t missed it_.

“Thank god,” Arthur whispers into Eames’s neck. “I spent all night trying to think of excuses I could make to everyone… about why we would have to postpone… the best thing I could come up with was that you had appendicitis or that you’d fallen in a ditch or something…”

“I’m so sorry,” Eames turns his head and whispers into the hair above his ear, “I’m so sorry I scared you.”

“I’m just glad you’re back.” Arthur pushes back and looks up at him, smiling. “I’m just so glad I can marry you today.”

Eames smiles and thinks of the bright-eyed boy he was just with in the woods. Arthur was somewhere around 11 years old. It’s partially his fault that he traveled this time, he thinks. He was reflecting about his life with Arthur, and it brought him right to Arthur’s backyard seventeen years beforehand. Arthur had just gotten back from soccer practice. His cheeks were flushed and his hair was messy and in his eyes. He’d grinned and flung himself down next to Eames, telling him all about practice and how his orchestra teacher had told him he had a knack for bowing and science class and the last Batman comic he’d read.

And Eames had listened and watched him lovingly. He couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by how much he adored Arthur, Arthur’s soul, Arthur’s spirit.

Eames scoops Arthur further into his arms ( _his_ Arthur, the gorgeous man lying in front of him that he’s going to cry when he sees at the end of the aisle later that day, he just knows it), pressing his lips to his forehead and closing his eyes which are quickly filling with preemptive tears.

“Marrying you will be the greatest thing I ever do.”

Arthur must hear the emotion seeping into Eames’s voice before he cups his chin and twists so he can rest their foreheads together, looking into his eyes. He smiles softly, brushing his thumb along the stubble under Eames’s jaw. Eames expects his lip to quirk with some cheeky retort of how sappy he is, but instead his eyes are soft.

“I love you.”

Eames responds with a kiss, pressing Arthur back down into the mattress. He doesn’t need to say it.

Arthur knows, and Arthur’s always known. He’ll never stop loving Arthur.

He feels Arthur’s hands snake down his back, nails scraping lightly against his skin and making him shiver. They have a couple hours before they have to get up and start getting ready, after all. Mal will be breathing down his neck soon enough, making sure they both look sublime before walking down the aisle.

But right now, Eames thinks as he peels Arthur’s pajamas off and flings them across the room, all is well, and all can wait.

 

**

 

**Arthur, Age 31**

**(Eames, Age 33)**

 

Arthur wakes up the morning of his father’s funeral to an empty bed.

Any other morning, he would have sighed and tugged on one of Eames’s various English football hoodies and padded to the kitchen to make coffee and shake off the sinking feeling of loneliness that he was once so used to.

But this isn’t any other morning, and disbelief lodges itself inside of Arthur’s brain so profoundly that he spends a few seconds patting desperately at the empty mattress beside him, as if he’ll somehow manifest again like he’d never left.

It takes every ounce of strength Arthur has in his body to sit up and get ready. Facing this alone isn’t something he planned on. When he found out the news, Eames was behind him, a Trojan warrior, solid and unmoving and everything he needed him to be in that moment. He carried Arthur to bed and stroked his hair for hours as Arthur stared out the window and watched the rain fall. He knew, then, that he could do this with Eames by his side.

He sinks to the floor in the shower, pressing his back against the tiled wall and letting the hot spray of water hit him right in the face. Disbelief. _Betrayal_. These are all things he feels but hates himself for feeling regardless. He _knows_ Eames can’t control when he goes. He couldn’t have simply set this aside in his schedule. It’s not something he can turn off, or subdue, or stop. When Eames goes it’s like the passing of time: inevitable, unpredictable, and _never_ as planned.

He realizes the betrayal he feels isn’t towards Eames, but the universe. He feels like there is some sort of cosmic vendetta against him.

He dresses impeccably, the joints in his fingers feeling stiff and numb as he pulls it up to his collar, looking himself over in the mirror. He rubs ruefully at his eyes as if somehow that will take away the dark bruised circles underneath them.

He leaves a note on the kitchen table, just in case Eames somehow gets back before he returns (which he knows is entirely unlikely, but still does anyway, because he’s Arthur and Arthur is anything but unprepared).

(Except when he is).

He drives by himself the three hours from Boston to Middlesex, Vermont. He’ll be spending the night with his mother in their old house after the service, which they’re also holding in their house, helping her sort through most his father’s old things to throw out or donate. Something about doing that the night of the funeral itself feels wrong to him, but his mother doesn’t want to have to look at any reminders of him for a while.

Pointedly not looking at the empty passenger’s seat, Arthur understands more than he should.

When he arrives at the church, it’s crowded and buzzing with hushed voices and sympathetic shoulder-squeezes. Everyone turns to look at him with sad eyes when he steps inside. He knows he looks like shit. He was at the funeral home for hours the previous day, making arrangements so his mom wouldn’t have to. Eames had been there through everything with him, even making many of the phone calls himself.

“ _I couldn’t do this without you,”_ Arthur had said when they were alone that night.

Eames had just smiled in a sad sort of way. Arthur knew better than to assume he could make any promises. And once again, he’s been proven right. His validation comes in the form of a solid weight sinking to the bottom of his stomach and dragging his center of gravity down toward the earth.

He passes Ariadne, who bolts out of her seat and flings her arms around him. When she pulls back there’s tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, which Arthur pecks before accepting a handshake and shoulder-slap from Yusuf. He gives him a knowing look about Eames’s absence and Arthur sighs, his will too weak to assure Yusuf that he shouldn’t blame himself for not being able to fix things yet.

He peels himself away from Ariadne, finally, and finds his mother in the front pew, staring at the coffin with transfixed eyes and a blank expression while fellow mourners try and offer their sympathies. Arthur shoos them away with an incline of his head, before taking the seat next to her. Without looking at him, she reaches over and takes his hand in hers, rubbing against the spot between his thumb and pointer finger. He looks down at their hands and notes the absence of the normal ink stain present on her middle finger. She’s written every day for the last thirty years, he reckons, until this week.

“Where’s Cedric?” she says quietly, when the silence between them becomes thick and uncomfortable.

“He had something really important come up for work,” Arthur says quickly, and curses how good he’s become at lying. “He wishes he could be here… he sends all his love.”

His mother glances over at him, the corner of her lips lifting ever so slightly.

“I wish he was here. For your sake, pumpkin.”

Arthur shrugs one shoulder and leans in, pecking her cheek.

“I’m okay, Mom. I can do this,”

She reaches up and scrubs her thumb over his dimple, or where his dimple would be were it present, and sighs, melancholy.

“He was so proud of you,” she begins to say before she’s cut off by the sudden hush of the ceremony starting.

Arthur hates funerals. He hates the idea of everyone gathering around your corpse, moping and crying and thinking about how much they’ll _miss you_ instead of any good things that may have happened in life. He thinks it’s selfish, with everyone only thinking about how the death affects them instead of how it’ll affect Arthur and his mother. Theirs is the family that was broken; a piece of their puzzle disappearing for the rest of eternity with no trace.

The minister seems to talk for forever; an endless string of pre-recorded memories and accomplishments about and of his father, and Arthur gets irrationally angry. _The man’s only been dead for three days,_ he thinks, _and they’re already making him seem so far away_.

He wishes everyone could skip the formalities, say goodbye, put the damn coffin in the ground, and go get shitfaced. Inevitabilities are inevitable, after all, so why beat around the bush? He resisted any sort of liquid grief up until now, but with Eames gone, he doesn’t know how he can possibly get through the service afterward, or the next few nights in general, without the end of a bottle secured to his lips.

He wishes that were the case at this exact moment – that he was shitfaced – when he’s called up to give his eulogy.

 _This is bullshit_ , he thinks, and reaches over to squeeze Eames’s hand for support and finds nothing but cold church air; the rough, worn wood of the pew.

He stands slowly, feeling the sorrowful gaze of everyone behind to him boring holes in his back. His mother gives his wrist a soothing squeeze but it doesn’t help. Arthur feels like he wants to either vomit or run. He walks to the podium and looks down at his hands for a long moment. He’s holding the notecard he wrote down some key words and phrases as talking points down on (Eames had guided him through it and helped him take breaks to collect his thoughts). For whatever reason, however, no words come to his mind. No loving memories, or fun stories, or tearful thoughts. He looks down at his father’s coffin and feels undeniably empty, like he’s facing some massive precipice into the void and he’s toeing off the edge. He can see his mom frown and other various relatives and friends of his father’s shift uncomfortable in the silence, no one daring to breathe less it be taken as rude.

“My dad –” Arthur begins, the words getting caught at the back of his soft pallet like there’s something blocking them from escaping his lips. He clears his throat and shakes his head, trying to start over, but this time no sound comes out at all. He can feel himself breaking apart at the seams, his hands starting to tremble and his vision starting to blur.

Someone in the back of the church coughs uncomfortably. There are some low murmurs, and Arthur scowls.

And it’s the very moment his muscles kick into action to sprint out of the church that the door at the back swings open and Eames steps inside. Arthur freezes and his face goes slack. The world becomes gaudy and clear.

He looks slightly disheveled, his black suit a bit ruffled like he’d thrown it on in a hurry, and his hair’s sticking up a bit at the back. No one but Arthur is able to notice the dark circles under his eyes, the way he looks so exhausted and wary, like wherever he traveled back to was cold and restless. Everyone jumps at the sound, jolted out of the loaded silence, and turn to look at him.

He doesn’t look back at them, though. His eyes land on Arthur and stay there, his expression dissolving into one of understanding and calm. Arthur feels his shoulders physically drop, the muscles there turning into pulled taffy. Air finally reaches his lungs and the muscles in his throat stop constricting. The world starts spinning again.

Eames walks at a moderate pace to the front row of the chapel, sitting beside Arthur’s mother and scooping up her hand, pressing a kiss to it. She nearly collapses into him, whispering something into his ear that Arthur can’t hear. Eames’s eyes find him again, and they’re so _soft_ , so adoring, so apologetic, that Arthur has to look down at his notecard again to stop himself from either collapsing in relieved sobs or rushing to him and throwing himself into his arms, begging him to get him the _hell_ out of here.

The words on the notecard in his hands come back into focus.

“My dad was my hero,” Arthur reads in a leveled voice, and he’s surprised at how it doesn’t sound strangled. The air in the room becomes tangibly relieved. He sighs at the scribbled words on the card, shaking his head and tucking it into his breast pocket, looking up at the small crowd, continuing. “And it’s really hard to have to refer to him in past tense, because no matter how distant I was, physically, emotionally… he was always right there, in the present, wherever I needed him. Always.”

Arthur feels the tightness in his chest, the tears welling in his eyes, but he lets it happen despite himself.

“I don’t need to stand up here and tell you all about how incredible he was. Because you all already know. He was _my dad_ , and he was Superman to me. He taught me to fight for what I love, what makes me happy… just like he fought for Mom and me every single day. And I’m so angry that I never got to say goodbye to him,” his voice cracks, “but I guess that’s what this is for, really…” He pauses and finally lets his eyes land back on his father’s casket in front of him: beautiful mahogany with red roses. “Goodbye, Dad,” Arthur says quietly. “I love you. And I’ll never stop missing you. You’ll never stop being my hero.”

The tears are pouring down his face now but he doesn’t make any effort to wipe them away or hide them. He takes a step away from the podium, wrapping his arms around himself and shaking. He senses rather than sees Eames stand quickly and rush to his side, wrapping a firm arm around his waist, and lead him back to his seat. He sits back beside his mother and she hugs him tightly, both of them weeping without any sort of restraint or forced politeness. She strokes his hair and whispers things about he’s _just like him_ , and how much she loves him. He calms before her and keeps an arm around her for the rest of the service, barely listening to anything else. Eames’s hand is on his thigh, his thumb moving in soothing motions over the fabric of his slacks. He grips Eames’s wrist tightly, like it’s the only thing keeping him from freefall.

When the ceremony itself ends, everyone heads back to his childhood home for refreshments and dinner. Arthur arranged for his dad’s favorite restaurant – a small Italian shop just a few miles down the road in Montpelier – to cater the event, and for the first time since arriving at the side of his father’s deathbed too late three days ago, Arthur feels like he’s able to relax.

Eames keeps a solid, warm hand on the small of his back throughout most of the evening, smiling and talking fondly of Arthur’s dad whenever anyone asks, taking a lot of the burden off of Arthur to have to be a social butterfly.

Ariadne steals Eames under the guise of showing him some funny video of Yusuf and their cat on her phone, and Arthur takes the opportunity to slip down the stairs to the basement and out the sliding glass door to their land out back.

He walks the familiar path to the edge of the woods, the ground carved out and still grassless after years of being away from it, simply from how many times he walked these exact steps. He pauses before he reaches the brush and takes a long swig of his beer, admiring the way the light seeps through the leafy autumn trees and saturates everything in pink light.

“Thought I’d find you out here,” Eames says behind him, and Arthur has to turn and check that he isn’t an older, naked Eames.

But he’s still wearing his black suit (albeit dressed down slightly, with his jacket slung over his shoulder and his tie loosened). He looks much better than he did when he showed up at the church a couple of hours before, and Arthur steps forward and slots himself into Eames’s arms, burying his face in his shoulder and taking a moment to simply breathe him in, fill his lungs with him.

He can feel Eames look around and chuckle, shaking his head.

“Bizarre,” he mutters, “being here in my own time… almost feels like I’m not, but then you’re here, and you’re the right age, so I have to be.” He nuzzles his nose into Arthur’s hair and plants a kiss just behind his ear.

“It feels so different now. Being with you out here…” Arthur looks up at him, chin resting against his shoulder.

Eames takes the opportunity to press a kiss to his forehead. “How so?”

“I needed you back then, sure. But in a very different way. I loved you then too, but it was different as well. But I was never _in_ love with you, then. I thought I was, but I didn’t know what it felt like to be in love with anyone. I loved you in a sort of way a young boy loves something he can’t quite have but his whole world revolves around. But falling in love… it’s the one thing I got to do _with_ you.”

Eames smiles fondly and sways Arthur gently, reaching up to pull his jacket down from his shoulder and wraps it around both of them. They stay silent for a while, Arthur turning his face into Eames’s shoulder and closing his eyes, focusing on the gentle sound of air moving through Eames’s lungs, of his blood pumping through his heart.

“Where did you go?” Arthur murmurs, muffled by the fabric of Eames’s shirt.

“Dunno, really,” Eames sighs, “It was dark, and raining, and I was in the middle of nowhere. Probably somewhere I’ve been before, a while ago. I couldn’t find anywhere, though, so I just ran. It went on for about three hours before I tripped and it triggered me home. I found your note, rented a car and drove down, probably about two hours after you left. I didn’t call you because I didn’t want you to answer the phone while driving, or even during the service.”

Arthur responds by dragging his lips up Eames’s neck and finding his waiting mouth, kissing him hard. Eames holds him close and returns the motion, but breaks apart after a while, pressing another firm kiss to Arthur’s forehead.

He stills suddenly, drawing Arthur closer in a motion Arthur recognizes as protective. He turns his head and notices what Eames hears. There’s a rustling in the bushes for the briefest of seconds before it stills. Eames quirks an eyebrow and takes Arthur’s hand, walking over with him through the crunchy leaves. There, they find the box of clothes which still sits out, waiting for Eames, next to a small pool of blood.

“A fox must’ve gotten a bunny,” Arthur muses, momentarily caught up in how cool his younger self would have found this happening in his backyard.

“Mm,” Eames agrees and chuckles, but it doesn’t fully reach his eyes.

The breeze picks up then, nipping with icy lips at their ears and noses. Arthur feels Eames shiver before wrapping his arm around Arthur a bit tighter and leading him back to the house.

 

**

 

_Arthur, Age 10_

**(Eames, older)**

 

“Argh, I challenge ye to a duel, old man!” Arthur draws his sword (stick) and crouches, knees belt and toes pointed just like he saw in a movie the day before. It’s summer, and the sky is an endless expanse of topaz without a cloud to be seen.

Eames, annoyingly, doesn’t draw his own stick. Arthur wiggles his stick around and furrows his brow.

“ _Eames_ , that isn’t how you play the game! Now _draw_!”

Eames blinks and looks at Arthur as if he’d somehow forgotten he was there all together. He musters a smile but his eyes are stone cold and distracted.

“Right you are, sorry darling. Spaced out for a second.” He pulls up his own stick and gets into something that looks like a ready-positon. Arthur’s unimpressed. He spent 20 minutes scouring the edges of the woods for a stick that sturdy, and now Eames isn’t even going to put his heart into it. He’s waited _months_ for Eames to show back up so he could play this game with him.

Arthur lunges and Eames doesn’t even move, causing Arthur to jab him in the abdomen pathetically. Arthur sighs in frustration and backs up again.

“Eames, what’s wrong?! C’mon! Fight back! _En garde!_ ”

Eames drops his own stick and runs a hand through his hair. He has bags under his eyes and he looks like he hasn’t shaved in a while. In other words, to Arthur, he looks like the _perfect_ pirate, which is why it’s so _stupid_ that he won’t _play_ pirates with him.

“Nothing, petal,” Eames smiles and reaches over, catching Arthur and ruffling his hair. “I just don’t feel like playing around today. Why don’t we sit and chat instead? Tell me about school and everything else?”

Arthur huffs and elbows his way out of Eames’s grasp, his cheeks flushed in frustration and his lips turned down into a tight frown.

“No… I have to go.”

“Arthur… please, don’t go. I’m sorry.”

Eames looks down at he says it, before shaking his head and sighing.

“No… actually, you run along. Don’t bother with me today. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon and we can play pirates then.”

He doesn’t sound hurt or mad, just… sad. Arthur tries desperately to stop his lip from quivering and his eyes filling with tears, but he’s never been good at stopping himself from crying, even over the dumbest things. Quickly, he flings his stick aside and throws his arms around Eames, hugging him with all of his might.

“I’m sorry you’re sad. I hope you feel better.” Arthur sniffs. Embarrassed, he turns away from Eames, kicking clods of dirt as he walks back to his house. He turns before walking inside to see Eames frowning and looking down at his discarded stick. He doesn’t like Eames like this. Eames isn’t supposed to show up and be boring and sad. Eames is supposed to be fun and funny. Arthur hopes the next time Eames comes back, he’s younger, because this older Eames is decidedly no fun at all.

He goes inside.

 

**

 

**Arthur, Age 32**

**(Eames, Age 34)**

Mal and Ariadne seem more in charge of house shopping than either Eames or Arthur do, regardless of the fact that it’s _their_ house they’re shopping for. They walk ahead, chatting animatedly about the pros and cons of everything, commenting on the size of the windows and whether or not there’s an “open floor plan”. Arthur’s only watched so much House Hunters to understand vaguely what they’re talking about, but that’s exactly why he invited them.

He tries to keep up with them, commenting on things he likes and taking notes of their thoughts on his phone. The realtor looks overwhelmed and can barely get a word in edgewise.

Eames hangs back, silent for the most part, but in a blisteringly good mood. Every time Arthur glances back at him exasperatedly, Eames beams back at him, relaxed and unfazed.

Several times, Ariadne and Mal corner them and propose they purchase a house, and Eames will smile and shake his head, shrugging his shoulders.

“Not this one.”

Arthur lifts a suspicious eyebrow, starting to put the pieces together of Eames’s scheme. He likes to play these games sometimes when the odd event happens that he _knows_ is going to happen. Ariadne and Mal, however, seem oblivious, so they carry on.

House after house, nothing’s right. After one particular house, Mal glares daggers at Eames.

“You have _no taste_ , Cedric. _None_.”

Eames just grins and pecks her cheek.

“You’re probably right. But Arthur and I will be the ones inhabiting this house, so I think we have the last say.”

“This house is perfect! It’s _magnifique._ I’m sure Arthur likes it. Arthur and I share aesthetical preferences.”

Arthur shrugs.

“It’s nice. But I don’t want to live somewhere that doesn’t suit both of us.”

“I think it’s cold,” Ariadne interjects. “It doesn’t feel like a home. It feels like a museum.”

Mal scoffs and Eames herds them all back to the car. They bicker until they pull into the driveway of the next house, a beautiful old lakeside cabin with floor-to-ceiling windows and sunlight in every room. Arthur catches Eames grin out of the corner of his eye.

“Is this the one?” he whispers once the girls are out of earshot.

“Yes, love.” Eames draws Arthur in and kisses him softly before walking into the foyer with him.

“I love it,” Ariadne announces once the realtor leaves the room to let them discuss, “but Mal doesn’t.”

“It’s gauche. It lacks any sort of artistic style. It’s predictable and boring.”

“It’s the one,” Eames interjects, smug. Mal blinks.

“Non, Cedric. It’s not. It can’t be.”

“But it is.” He goes over and pecks her forehead, laughing. “You two were just so excited to house hunt. And I didn’t want to ruin it for you, but I’ve already been to this house. I’ve traveled here, and I know it’s ours.”

Mal narrows her eyes but Eames holds his hands up, stopping her.

“I know, I know. You feel like you wasted your time, but we would have had to house hunt anyway until we found it because I’ve only ever been inside. And to respond to your previous comment… the artistic style comes from how Arthur decorates. It’s marvelous, and you’ll approve.”

Arthur has to shove his hand over his mouth to stop the bark of laughter building in his throat from leaving his mouth. Ariadne looks much in the same predicament, both of her hands clasped over her mouth, her forehead red. Mal narrows her eyes and brushes Eames off, sighing.

“You’ve always been such a pain in the ass,” she tells Eames, squeezing his hand. She takes one more look around and shakes her head, sighing.

“I suppose with some nice artwork… maybe some darker furniture…”

“I’ll run all of my decisions on decor by you,” Arthur pipes up, no longer able to hide his amused grin.

“You’d better.” She pouts and looks out the window. “I suppose it’s nice that it’s near a lake. It’ll be lovely in the summertime.”

Ariadne takes Mal’s arm and hauls her off so she can reevaluate the upper floor and get a better look at the view.

Eames catches Arthur’s wrist as he goes to follow them, wrapping an arm around him and leans in, whispering against his temple.

“Welcome home, darling.”

 

**

**Eames, Age 35**

**(Arthur, Age 33)**

 

Eames opens his eyes and he’s back in the kitchen of their house but everything feels wrong. The first things he notices is the thick pillar of steam coming from a pot on the stove that’s boiled over, and then the full glass of wine and the radio that’s been left on.

“Arthur?” he calls softly, and then again, louder.

“Arthur, darling, where are you?”

He turns off the radio and the house is eerily silent except for the evening birds chirping happily outside of their foyer window. He pads upstairs and to their bedroom to put on some clothes and resume his search when he’s stopped at the door by a scene from a horror film.

Arthur’s sitting on the floor, paler than a ghost, with a massive pool of blood in front of him seeping into the hardwood. The blood looks like someone’s been murdered; it’s smeared in bloody handprints up the side of the cream duvet on their bed. His heart stops and then all at once starts pounding out of his chest.

“Arthur,” he says quietly, his voice uneven, “are you hurt?”

Arthur flinches hugely and then turns to him, his eyes wide and empty.

“I heard you,” he says quietly, eyes out of focus, lips slack. “I was in the kitchen, and I heard you. You were screaming for me… I ran… I was too late. You were gone… but I found this…” his dark eyes fill with tears that flood over and spill down his cheeks. Eames quickly toes over the blood to the dresser and pulls on some shorts before sliding over and collecting Arthur in his arms, turning him away from the gruesome sight before them.

“Eames,” Arthur says in a raspy voice that sounds like the air is carving out his lungs, “we don’t find a cure, do we?”

Eames doesn’t know the answer to this. He doesn’t know the answer to anything at the moment. The last time he was home before he traveled he’d just tried a new medication Yusuf prescribed him and it caused him to lose control and fall backwards in time. He’d wanted to scream when he woke up in the alleyway behind his old London flat.

“Right,” he says, cramming every last haunting thought away for the time being, “let’s get you out of here, hmm?” He reaches down expertly and scoops Arthur up in his arms bridal style, pressing a kiss to his temple as he quickly takes him out of the room and back downstairs. He sets Arthur on the couch and make sure the throw blanket is secured around him before he quickly takes the boiling pot off the stove.

He turns the radio back on for good measure, switching quickly to the classical station Arthur likes to listen to before bed.

After grabbing every heavy-duty cleaning supply they own out of the garage, he sets to work quickly scrubbing the blood off of the floor. He peels the duvet off the bed and takes it out to their garbage bin, reminding himself to get a new one in the morning.

When he returns to Arthur, he’s managed to go and collect his glass of wine from the kitchen and is sitting with it cradled in his hands carefully, his eyes staring directly ahead at the wall. The radio is off and the silence fills the room like some kind of poisonous vapor. Eames sits beside him and pulls him into his embrace, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.

“What are we going to do?” Arthur says in a quiet voice, laced with an undercurrent of panic.

Eames strokes his hair.

“Everything. We’re going to figure this out.”

“That was a lot of blood, Eames.” Arthur counters.

Eames looks down.

“You didn’t see me die.”

“I’ve never seen you older than your late thirties, maybe early forties...”

“Doesn’t mean we don’t find a cure.”

“Eames.” Arthur snaps his chin up and looks at him, his eyes verging on crazed. “ _What are we going to do?!_ ”

They’re both silent for a long moment, Arthur staring intently at Eames and Eames looking down at where Arthur’s hand is cradled in between his.

“We can’t live our lives waiting for the worst to happen,” Eames says finally, not realizing he’s shivering until he hears how his voice trembles. “If something bad happens, then I’m grateful for the foresight because now I’ll never take a single moment of my life with you for granted. So if something bad does happen, then so be it. If it doesn’t, then all the better. I’m going to carry on trying to fix this, but I’m not going to waste whatever amount of time I may or may not have left dwelling on it.”

He pauses, a new realization filling his mind like a rapidly-spreading disease and he’s unable to shake it. It twists its way around his soul and strangles him from the inside out. He closes his eyes.

“Arthur… love… _you don’t have to stay_. You don’t deserve this. You’ve always deserved so much better than this life. Better than what I put you through. You don’t have to stick around. I could never hold it against you if you wanted to leave all this rubbish behind.”

Arthur stands suddenly, walking over to the window and standing awkwardly with one arm wrapped tightly around himself, his posture rigid.

“How dare you,” he says so quietly that Eames barely hears him.

“Darling-“

“No, how _dare you_?” Arthur turns suddenly, his lips pressed into a hard line. His face is contorted with anger, violently pale against the dusk light. “Never say that again. Never suggest that again. I waited so long for you, Eames. I am _not_ fucking walking away.” And just like that, the beautiful, vicious rage seems to slowly vanish, deflating him. He moves until he’s in front of Eames again and kneels, evening their eyesight.

“I’m going to be by your side through all of this. No matter what happens.”

Eames can’t speak, so he just nods, looking down.

Arthur’s too good for him, he thinks. Arthur deserves a better life. Someone who doesn’t disappear. Someone who he can grow old with.

Arthur slides a hand around his neck and pulls him down, kissing him with tender lips.

Eames makes a noise akin to a whimper. Arthur draws him closer.

Getting Arthur to leave him would be impossible, he knows, because Arthur loves him. And this knowledge both comforts and terrifies him, because sometime over the last decade Arthur’s happiness became lengths more important than his own. But now, he’s faced with the very real possibility that the blood he just scrubbed off of the hardwood and rung out into the bathtub might indicate the very near reality of his last breath.

He’s never spoken to Arthur about the aftermath of his mother’s murder before. Mostly because when he told Arthur that his mother was murdered by his father in the first place, Arthur was nearly too horrified to speak, and Eames knew it was because Arthur doesn’t like finding out unknown secrets about Eames. He supposes that it draws into question some of the images Arthur’d painted of him, so to speak, as he grew up. He knows Arthur doesn’t like to think back to _that_ Eames having a tragic backstory, because then _that_ Eames becomes more of an anomaly than some sage, mystic being. And Arthur would never admit this, of course. And Arthur would probably rather _die_ than know that Eames has psychoanalyzed him in this way, and Eames is a guilty wreck over it, but regardless: Eames has never told Arthur the full story of the day his mother died.

For example, Eames told Arthur it was the first time he ever traveled. He also told Arthur that he escaped out a window and ran to the neighbors’ after his mother was shot, and that his father was found with a gunshot wound to the head, suggesting suicide.

He hasn’t told Arthur, however, that his older self had appeared to him in the closet after he’d traveled and told him everything. He hasn’t told him that his older self was the one who dressed him and got him out that window.

He hasn’t told Arthur that his own blood was found along with his father’s blood in his childhood bedroom, and how it confounded multiple detectives and policemen that he didn’t have a scratch or a nick on him.

The fact of this has loomed over his life like a shadow: always there, but never really addressed. At some point after his tumultuous youth of petty crime and rebellion, he’d come to terms with it and decided that life was worth living instead of worrying about things he can’t change. And if he’s being honest, the thought of it hasn’t occurred to him in quite a few years. Arthur had replaced most ill thoughts in his life with effervescence and color.

When he opens his eyes again, Arthur is still there. His beautiful Arthur, with all of his sharp handsome features and his hooded sloe-eyes and his hair which is beginning to prematurely grey slightly, no doubt from the stress brought on by their situation. _His_ Arthur, his reason for waking up each morning and carrying on. His reason for fighting to find a cure, putting himself under hours of painful tests and treatment experiments. Part of him, he thinks, wouldn’t mind dying all that terribly. At least there’s some consistency in dying; no traveling to unknown places, naked and cold and alone. But then he imagines Arthur ( _his_ Arthur), without him, lonely and depressed and miserable and the thought alone is enough to make Eames want to _fight_ and claw and scrape his way through this until things can be fixed. Until things can be _changed_.

He puts his hands on either side of Arthur’s face and looks him square in the eye.

“We’re going to figure this out.”

Arthur looks back in his eyes searchingly, desperately, but nods once before falling into him, burying his face in his chest. Eames holds him like it’s the end of the world.

 

**

 

_Eames, older_

It’s quite a shock to Eames when he opens his eyes and finds himself in Mal’s old London apartment. It’s evening, which means she’s probably still in class. All he can find that fits him is her bathrobe, which he wraps around himself before sitting on the edge of her bed, waiting for her.

He can’t help but wondering why she never told him about this.

When she gets home, she nearly screams. She knows about his condition by now, but it’s still the phase where it stuns and scares her.

“Cedric?!” she stares at him with wide eyes, her hand clutched over her chest. Her hair is still long, down to her mid-back in her beautiful silky waves. Eames remembers being in love with her… remembers how it feels.

It’s just echoes, though. The ghosts of feelings that are no longer there.

“Hi, love. Sorry for scaring you. I just showed up here… for whatever reason.”

“It’s okay,” she smiles and moves over toward him, sitting next to him and touching his arm. “How old are you?”

“Old enough,” Eames snorts. “And you must be around twenty-one…?”

“Twenty-two,” she corrects.

“Ah, the year you finish undergrad.”

“Oui… almost finished with my senior thesis,” she beams. “So… is there any particular reason you traveled here…?”

She looks into his eyes and Eames can see something there… something he used to long to see but never quite did. Eames frowns, putting the pieces together.

“Maybe. I think so.”

She beams, starry-eyed and so full of youth, and catches his face in her hands, leaning in.

“This is the proof I was waiting for. The proof that we’re meant to be together.”

Eames sighs and takes hold of her wrists, stopping her from moving forward. Arthur’s face floods through his mind, his beautiful Arthur, and suddenly he knows why he’s here. It all makes sense to him… how he used to be certain he and Mal were going to be together… they’d even made love a few times, but she was non-committal. He was just starting to be certain they would end up together when she broke his heart, told him he was nothing but a brother to her. It ruined him for love for years until he found Arthur.

But it happened. It _has_ to happen.

“No, Mal. No… we aren’t. I know now why I’m here… why I was supposed to come back to this moment. Because you need to break my heart.”

Mal’s brow furrows and her eyes well with tears. She shakes her head.

“But… _non_ , Cedric… you’re _here_ … that has to _mean something_ … I’ve been waiting for you to come back to me. So I could be _sure_ …”

“I’m here because right now, in your time, I’m in love with you. But I’m meant for someone else. And so are you. You’ll meet him soon.”

“ _Non…_ Cedric…”

“We can’t be together, Mal. Not in this way. Please do this for me. For both of us.” Eames smiles sadly, sighing. “I already know that you _do_ do this. Because it happened. And we can’t change the future.”

“ _You’re_ changing the future.” She turns away, wiping at her tears ruefully. She doesn’t look back at him.

“You’ll understand one day,” he assures her as he feels himself start to fade. He leans in and pecks the back of her head. “And you’ll be happy. I promise.”

 

**

 

**Arthur, Age 34**

**(Eames, Age 36)**

Arthur peeks around the curtain and scans the buzzing audience for what feels like the thousandth time. There’s a seat in the second row that’s empty – that’s been empty for the last hour – and Arthur _knows_ why and it fills him with absolute dread. The dread seeps all the way down to his toes and twists around his bones like some kind of poisonous vines.

Every time Eames travels now, Arthur feels like he’s walking a tight rope, balancing on an unsteady chord suspended above a sort of endless chasm. He now has to struggle with the feeling that whenever Eames goes, he might not come back.

Or he might come back to him bloody and lifeless.

Only, this is the worst possible time. Not that any time is ideal, but he just got promoted to fucking first chair of the Boston Phil and his husband is missing and his husband could possibly be dead and _oh god_ , Arthur thinks, _I can’t fucking breathe_.

“So.” His conductor, Saito, appears behind him like a fucking apparition, manifesting whenever he’s least wanted. “Do you feel prepared? The entire second half of the Bach depends on you.”

Arthur sucks in a sharp breath and squeezes the block of rosin in his fist a little too hard, feeling a sharp edge digging into his flesh.

“I’m ready,” he says through gritted teeth, his eyes staring straight ahead at the empty seat, willing Eames to appear in it and turn his world right side up again.

As the first chair cello, he files onto the stage first, as it’s at the farthest end. His cello (the one Eames bought him on his 30th birthday) is sitting on its side, the grain of the solid, dark maple standing out against the harsh stage lights. He lifts it carefully and sticks the spike in his stopper, which is secured to his chair, and rests it back against his body. It comforts him, the solid feel of the wood against him, giving him something to lean on and breathe with.

He lifts his bow, which has already been tightened, up from the stand in front of him as his chair partner, Xi Lu, sits beside him and plucks at her strings anxiously. After running his bow through his rosin, he brushes it against the strings, closing his eyes and letting the vibrations rumble through his chest. All at once he’s rushed back to the moment he first played this cello, his smile dimpling so much it nearly hurt, Eames beaming like a chuffed schoolboy, leaning against the wall with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his lips swollen from all of the kissing Arthur’d done when he walked in the room to find the cello with a bright red bow wrapped around its neck. Tears blur his vision but he blinks them away, reaching forward with a trembling hand to open the binder which contains his music.

“Hey,” Xi Lu says to him over the roar of all the tuning, “you’ll do great tonight. It’s been a long time coming.”

“Thanks,” Arthur manages to choke out, giving her a lopsided smile that she squints at. He turns from her to avoid any more questioning and strikes the bow against the strings a little more forcefully, pushing the beautiful, resonant sound out into the world like somehow, Eames can hear it. Like it’ll call to him. He squeezes his eyes shut and focuses all his energy on it, as if he actually believed in magic, as if he actually believed in happy endings instead of the universe punishing him for some unknown crime.

Soon, the concert master is playing an A for the orchestra to officially tune, before the auditorium falls into a hush and Saito walks out, coattails flipping behind him and making him look like he’s on some sort of a runway instead. For a moment, Arthur gets lost in it all. The buzzing in his ears consumes him and he happily lets himself experience the adrenaline, the stage fright, the nerves. Anything to distract him.

Saito nods to the audience before turning to his orchestra, lifting his baton. Arthur straightens his back and sits on the edge of his seat, bow falling easily into ready position. And – just because he can’t stop himself – he takes a glance at the audience, at the chair, and finds a familiar face staring back at him.

Eames looks rough. Well – rough is an understatement. Arthur can see the bags under his eyes even through the darkness, but his eyes are oddly bright. He perks up a bit when he notices Arthur’s eyes on him and flashes him a smile, but it doesn’t reach the rest of his face. Arthur could sink through the floor with relief, but instead he levels his eyes back on Saito and focuses on playing the best show of his life.

Dvorak’s New World Symphony is by no means _easy_. It’s a solid hour of grueling, violent melodies broken up by soft, sweet pieces of heaven that drift through space with dissonance, like the second movement. Arthur manages not to mess up the duet he has with the concert master at the end of the second movement, keep on his toes, so to speak, through the fluid third movement, and then crash and bang his way through the triumphant final movement, regardless of the fact he’s shaking like a leaf.

The applause goes on for fifteen minutes afterward, Saito beckoning everyone to stand up and sit down multiple times. Arthur locks eyes with Eames about half way through and chances a smile, which is returned but with eyes so sad Arthur aches. As soon as he’s able, he exits the stage and packs up his cello, running out to the place he and Eames planned to meet outside of the theater that morning.

He finds Eames leaning against the brick wall, his arms crossed tightly and his lips set into a line. When he sees Arthur the corner of his lips twitches and he flings his arms out wide.

“Darling! You were magnificent. Congratulations on your first performance in first chair.” He hugs Arthur tightly and pecks his ear. Arthur stiffens.

“Eames, I can tell something’s wrong. Talk to me. I thought you traveled when I didn’t see you in the audience… I was so scared…”

“I didn’t travel, love. Not today.”

“Then… but…”

“Mal’s dead.” The words tumble out of Eames’s mouth like lead and Arthur stops dead in his tracks, feeling like his chest is caving in.

“ _What_?” he gasps.

“I… she… I had no idea she was so bad… I thought she was just… down. I guess… well… she was meeting Dom for their anniversary night at the hotel they always stayed at and she planned everything out and jumped when he got there… from the forty-first story.”

“Oh god,” Arthur pales and reaches for Eames’s arm, squeezing. “I… are you…?”

Eames crumbles like he’s been holding himself together with every bit of effort, stepping forward and falling into Arthur, burying his face in his shoulder and letting out wrecked sobs. Arthur just holds him, stunned, unable to move or think.

“I’m so sorry,” Eames wheezes. “I didn’t want to ruin tonight for you. You’ve been waiting so bloody long for this…”

“Tonight doesn’t matter. This is what matters,” Arthur shoots back and wraps a firm arm around Eames’s middle. “C’mon, let’s get you home.”

“I need to… I need to call Miles and see if he needs any help with the kids until he arrives... I think they have Dom in prison… they’re questioning him…”

“They think he pushed her?” Arthur shakes his head at the monstrosity of the idea, because he sometimes caught Dom looking at Mal like she was the most beautiful thing in the world.

“I don’t know. I guess so. Bloody wankers.” Eames all but growls, curling his fingers into Arthur’s shirt.

Arthur loads his cello into the car and then loads Eames in as well, making sure both pieces of precious cargo are strapped in sufficiently before sliding into the driver’s seat and taking off.

Whether they’re going to the police station or home, he doesn’t know. But, they have time.

Mal’s death sits sharp and heavy right at the front of his mind. Imaginary but likely accurate images of her mangled body sprawled against pavement, her eyes open and empty staring forward into nothing appear every time he blinks.

His mind morphs them into images of Eames: drenched in blood, his body mangled, his eyes open and unseeing…

 _We have time_ , he tells himself as he speeds down the street, even though he doesn’t believe it for a second.

 

**

 

**Eames, Age 37**

**(Arthur, Age 35)**

 

Arthur’s asleep when it happens.

Eames knows, logically, it’s better this way.

He was watching Arthur sleep. He’d drifted off while they were snuggled up in bed, watching some dumb television show. Eames had turned the tv off and stroked Arthur’s hair off of his forehead, and that’s when he felt the pull.

He fought it, for all it was worth. He focused on Arthur’s face, the beating of Arthur’s heart, but it was too strong. Before he can stop anything he’s standing in his childhood bedroom, the sounds of his parents screaming at each other drifting up through the floorboards.

The fear is almost paralyzing, but he manages to push it all down to the furthest reaches of himself and yank the blanket off of the bed, wrapping it around his middle before opening the closet door.

His heart nearly breaks at the sight of his eight-year-old self cowering in a corner, shivering violently with a soggy, red face. The words tumble out of his mouth so easily, as if he were reciting a script he’d memorized ages ago. They’re words he’s tossed around in his mind for nearly three decades, and he’d always thought that when he said them for real he’d feel some sort of peace. But that isn’t there. The argument downstairs gets worse and Eames fights the feeling that he’s still a scared little boy in a closet instead of the strange hero who showed up to save him.

The child’s sobbing brings him back to the present, calming him, almost. He looks down at the scared little boy and thinks of the future he’s going to have. All of the pain, all of the fear… and all of the happiness. All of the _Arthur_ that awaits this little boy in his future.

 _It’s worth it_ , he thinks. _It’s all been worth it_.

“Things will be okay, darling.” Eames says as he takes the boy’s face in his hands. “They will be one day.”

And then he hears the gunfire and his mother’s last scream before silence falls. Every cell in his body screams for him to go and stop it, but he knows he can’t. He knows what he has to do. He carries his younger self to the window and gets him out of it, watching to make sure he makes it down okay (he knows he does) and take off running through the yard and across the street.

Eames closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, listening to the slow sound of his father walking up the stairs in contrast to the pounding of rushing blood in his ears. He turns when the door opens and is met with his father’s shocked face.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” His father looks deranged; his sea grey eyes are eerily bright and there’s a bit of blood on the collar of his shirt.

Eames can’t help but smile a bit. He knows how this ends.

“What’re you fuckin’ smiling about, mate? You’re gonna fucking die. Where’s the kid?”

“He’s somewhere you’ll never be able to reach him.” Eames says darkly, “Until now, that is.”

“Wha…?” His father narrows his eyes before every bit of confusion written into his features is replaced with rage. Eames doesn’t wait for him to raise the gun. He lunges. He hears the bang and he feels the white-hot pain sink into his stomach, but it’s all periphery. He wrestles the gun from his father and shoves it against his temple.

“My name is Cedric Eames.” He feels the tears biting at the edges of his eyes, blurring his vision, but he doesn’t care. He stares into his father’s suddenly very wide eyes and recognizes his own recognition. He knows he’s not lying. “That little boy you were coming up here to slaughter, just like you did his mother… I want you to know that you _don’t_ ruin his life. You don’t get that satisfaction because he grows to be ten times the man you ever were, and he’s _happy_. And you… you’re nothing. You’re _pathetic_.”

And then he waits for the fear to fill his father’s eyes before pulling the trigger. He does it not because he wants to, particularly, but because it _happens_ , and it has to happen in order for him to meet Arthur and move on with his life. Only when his father’s body falls limp against the floor does the pain register in Eames’s mind. He drops the gun like it’s suddenly molten, flinging himself away from the dead body. When he exhales he can feel thick, warm, sticky blood spurt from the wound in his abdomen, soaking his favorite Star Wars blanket. He can’t breathe, and the world is all at once fuzzy and sharp.

And then he’s falling. He feels the falling stop at points. He feels carpet beneath him. Hardwood. Leaves. Grass. He screams for Arthur but he doesn’t even know if he’s making sounds.

 

*

 

_Arthur, older_

 

It’s a cool but sunny day. Arthur finds himself drifting off in the chair he’s pushed up next to the big floor-to-ceiling window in the living room, trying to soak up every bit of sunlight he can after one of the most grueling winters in recent memory. He decides to give himself over to a nap, because he didn’t sleep very well the previous night and the sunlight feels like a warm blanket. Dog-earing his book and setting it in his lap, he rests his head against the back of the chair and stretches out his stiff limbs, closing his eyes, and taking a long, slow breath.

His mind is just on the verge of turning itself off for the time being when he hears the sudden sounds of strangled gasps and labored breathing. His eyes flash open and he lunges up at once, his hand flying to his mouth in shock at the scene in front of him.

“Eames?!” He kneels next to the body on the floor, pale and hazy-eyed. Acting quickly, he rushes to the bathroom to grab the first aid kit before rushing back, tossing it down and pressing his hands over the entry wound. The realization floods over him and his blood runs cold. “Oh god… you just came from… oh god, _Eames_ , I’m so sorry you had to-”

“Ar-Arthur?” Eames manages to say through the blood in his throat. “I… Arthur I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry I left you. I love you. _I bloody love you_ , never forget that…”

“Shut up and stay still,” Arthur directs him, furrowing his brow and focusing on stopping the bleeding. He’s no doctor, that’s for damn sure, but he’s gotten pretty good at preventing bleeding as of late.

 

*

 

**Eames**

 

“No, listen to me,” Eames insists even though his vision is pooling with black spots and he feels his body going terrifyingly numb. “I love you more than anything. Always, always remember that.”

He thinks suddenly about how lucky he is, that he gets to say goodbye to Arthur. This was never an eventuality he expected. He didn’t think the universe was capable of throwing him even this small kindness.

The world grows blacker and blacker around the edges. Eames looks up at Arthur’s face and lets himself smile softly, reaching up to graze his blood-soaked fingers against Arthur’s beautiful cheek. He looks older, he thinks. In his forties. He’s still beautiful, though. Still his Arthur.

“Eames…” Arthur says in an urgent voice, but Eames is already slipping out of consciousness, ready for the pain to be over, ready to die in Arthur’s arms.

 

 

Which is why when he wakes up in a bed in massive amounts of pain, he’s rather confused.

Arthur’s sitting beside him – the same older Arthur from before – reading a book and looking entirely calm. He has thick-rimmed reading glasses that suit him quite well and his hair’s cut short, making him look quite dignified and regal. For a moment Eames wonders if he _is_ dead, because younger Arthur wouldn’t be caught _dead_ in reading glasses, but that thought gets quickly put out by the sensation of being stabbed with a hot poker.

Arthur looks up when Eames makes a gagging noise, the pain burning up against his diaphragm.

“Here.” Arthur ushers a few white pills into his mouth and helps him swallow them down with some water afterwards. When Arthur sets down the glass he brushes his hand against Eames’s forehead and chuckles.

“I suppose you’re probably a little confused.”

“I’m supposed to be dead,” Eames mutters lowly. “That’s always been how it’s supposed to be.”

“Cedric Eames, if I’ve learned anything during our life together, it’s to always expect the unexpected.” Arthur smiles, dimple shadowing perfectly against the cool sunlight coming in from the windows.

“So, I live.” It isn’t a question, exactly, but rather a shocked statement of utter relief.

“Well so far,” Arthur chuckles, leaning down to brush his lips against Eames’s temple.

“How… how old are we?”

“You just turned 43, and I’m 41.”

“This makes no sense,” Eames counters. “You were right… you never saw me older than I am now. I never traveled back to the future… or forward to it, until now…”

Arthur dimples and strokes his hair. Eames notes that he’s gentler somehow, softer…

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” He smiles and stands, walking across the room and into the bathroom. When he returns, he’s carrying a bright orange prescription pill bottle. He sits on the edge of the bed and hands it to him. Eames squints at it.

“Memorize the name of this medication, because it sets everything straight. I don’t know how to explain the science of it… something about chemical imbalances mixed with gene mutations… Yusuf will be able to figure it out. But this is how it happens. This is how you find the cure.”

Eames looks down at the small bottle in his hands and has the sudden urge to laugh and cry, so he does. He runs a hand over his face and reads the name of the medication over and over again, implanting it to his memory. After several minutes, he thinks he knows the medication more than he knows his own name. When he looks up, Arthur has tears in his eyes as well.

He tries to adjust but winces instead, even though whatever pills Arthur gave him are wearing in, he can feel the tug of stiches in his upper abdomen.

“How’d you learn to give stitches?”

“I taught myself when I knew this was coming,” Arthur shrugs.

Eames manages to arrange himself comfortably again, letting out a puff of air. He looks around the room, noticing for the first time that it is, in fact, their bedroom in their Vermont house in the woods. It’s been painted a different color, however, and the sun is shining white light through the windows. “So this is it, then? This is the last time I travel?”

Arthur smiles.

“I’m supposed to tell you no, you travel once more, and then you start taking the medication. That’s what you told me I have to say,” he laughs.

Eames reaches up, ignoring how weak he feels, and brushes his thumb against Arthur’s lips. He lifts an eyebrow.

“This last visit… isn’t going to be quite as… _interesting_ , is it?”

“No. Definitely not.” Arthur cups his face and scrubs his thumb soothingly against the line of his jaw, smiling tenderly, his eyes a bit mystified. “This is really it, the last time I get to see you like this. It’s like a small window into the past…” His eyes sweep over Eames’s face greedily as if he’s trying to set everything to memory. Eames squeezes Arthur’s wrist, starting to feel the sinking feeling in his lower stomach that means he’s about to slip back in time.

“Arthur, tell me we’re happy. Tell me everything’s okay.”

Arthur smiles then, radiantly. He opens his mouth to speak, but turns his head suddenly when the sound of the front door opening breaks through the peaceful silence of the house.

He hears his own voice: “Alright, alright, but just this once, okay? _Tomorrow_ , you take a nap. And the next day, and the _next day_. Promise?”

And then: “I _promise,_ Papa. Can we have hot cocoa now!? _Pleeeease_?”

Eames’s eyes widen.

“Yes, yes, alright. Go get your Daddy, I always burn the milk.”

“DADDY! WE’RE GONNA MAKE HOT COCOA!”

The voices echo, the second voice that is obviously not his is that of a child, and it sounds like the most beautiful sound Eames has ever heard. He looks back to Arthur who glances back at him warmly.

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” he manages to say before everything around Eames fades.

 

*

 

When he arrives back home, Arthur’s still asleep. Eames stays still for a moment, listening to the sound of his deep, steady breathing and watching the subtle ways his eyes twitch beneath the lids. Eames hopes he’s having a happy dream. He feels like everything’s a happy dream.

He pulls out his phone and sends a long text to Yusuf with the name of the medication and an explanation of everything. After he sends it, he sets his phone down and turns over to see Arthur awake and watching him with a furrowed brow.

“Why’re you smiling?” he slurs, voice still heavy with sleep. He looks suspicious, even if Eames can see the bits of curiosity lingering behind his eyes.

“I have a lot to tell you,” Eames says, carefully shuffling so he’s laying at eye-level with Arthur. He takes his hands and gives them a soft squeeze.

“So… are you gonna tell me?” Arthur says after a pause.

Eames just grins.

“I will, in a moment. We have _time_.”

 

**

 

Epilogue

 

_Arthur, Age 10_

**(Eames, older)**

 

Eames is already waiting outside by the time Arthur sprints out to meet him. It’s a lush summer and everything’s in full-bloom; green and gaudy and vibrant. Eames beams and has his arms outstretched wide. When Arthur leaps into them, he squeezes him and spins him around a bit before setting him back down and kneeling in front of him.

“You’re late!” Arthur pouts but can’t hide his toothy grin. “I’ve been waiting _months_ for you!”

He bops Eames’s nose in reprimand and Eames beams in response.

“Sincerest apologies, Arthur. I promise I’ll be more timely from here on out.”

“You’d _better_ be!” Arthur smiles broadly and Eames releases him.

Arthur takes his hand and drags him toward the woods.

“C’mon! I have so much to show you! I found a special place for my rock collection and I found a really cool place where the bushes kind of make a cave.”

Eames squeezes his hand and grins adoringly, not taking his eyes off of Arthur.

“Yes, darling. Show me _everything_.”

Arthur pulls him off through the trees and bushes, jabbering excitedly while the sun warms them to their bones.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been brought to my attention that another TTW AU exists in this fandom. It's _excellent_ but quite different, and it's canon-compliant, so I'll link it [here](http://pyrimidine.livejournal.com/8007.html). Go give it a read!!! 
> 
> Title comes from the Walt Whitman poem ["Perfection"](http://www.bartleby.com/142/34.html). 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! This took me _months_. I tweaked and fiddled and I got to the point where I said f*ck it, so I'm just slapping it up here. I hope you enjoyed, please leave me a comment to let me know what you thought!
> 
> Or come and chat with me on [tumblr](http://www.ophiliad.tumblr.com)!


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